As long as he can blast Seoul into rubble (and he can) I just don't see him needing them. He's got plenty of deterrent right there. It's not like the Israelis who, thanks to anti-Semites and their deeply rooted hate (boarding on psychosis), have to worry about nut cases rolling in to exterminate them and just not caring about conventional weaponry. The NK/SK dynamic has always been a hostage situation. It's odd that the media never really talks about it. Then again like I said we're shopping around for our next big war. Looks like NK is out of the running. Syria & Iran are next up.
You're always a bit braver when the gun is pointed at your head instead of your neighbour's.
The artillery is a good deterrent, but not a great one when the US and China are your biggest threats. NK needs long range nukes if it wants to make sure that one of the giants doesn't decide they can "probably" solve the Kim problem without risking Seoul.
Trump surrounded NK with carriers and flew bombers off the coast. Moreover there are hard hitting sanctions that are harming Kim's ability to keep bribing his generals. This could have been done decades ago, but globalists find North Korea useful as a source of tension. The fact that millions suffer means nothing to them. Trump brought Kim to the table, but naturally nobody wants to give him credit because he's Hitler.
Kim wanted Nukes that could hit the US. Kim got Nukes that could hit the US. Therefore, Kim is ready to talk.
While I don't think the tweets were helpful, Trump did push for tougher sanctions against North Korea. Meanwhile, Trump also offered to engage in direct talks with North Korea, something past presidents have refused to do. North Korea has walked to negotiate directly with the United States, while previous presidents have insisted that any negotiations should be part of the six party talks. Trump stepped up the pressure, calling it "maximum pressure", while offering North Korea something the direct negotiations they wanted and a possible way out of the sanctions. Both the United States and South Korea have been clear that denuclearization is necessary to get the sanctions lifted. That is a substantial difference from the strategy of past presidents, and is a logical approach to foreign policy.
The tougher sanctions likely had a significant impact on North Korea and made them more willing to negotiate. Trump's willingness for direct talks signaled a willingness for unprecedented direct talks. The tweets weren't helpful, but Trump's foreign policy did influence North Korea to make real concessions. Trump should get credit for that, and you're ignoring the real substance of his foreign policy.
I was thinking that originally but now I'm not sure it has anything to do with Trump.
NK is pursuing the same thing now it's always pursued, survival.
Previously this took the form of gaining deterrence, first artillery, then Nukes, and finally Nukes that can hit the US. Until they had those things they were never going to engage in serious negotiations.
But now they have all those things their deterrence is kinda maxed out, they can always improve their long range delivery, but realistically they've done the important thing which is prove they can deliver a Nuclear retaliation against the US.
NK isn't talking because of sanctions, or because Trump reached out, they're talking because they got what they've always wanted, Nuclear deterrence, and now they want stability. Denuclearization isn't really on the table, but as long as everyone knows they have long range Nukes they're probably content to stop testing.
Let's just hope that Trump's threats to about the Iran nuclear deal are an effort to get Iran to extend their promises past 2025 and not a sincere intent to withdraw. If Trump is taking the role of the bad cop while Macron has the role of the good cop to negotiate more with Iran, it may be effective. If Trump actually withdraws, that's incredibly foolish. Trump is just so erratic that it's hard to distinguish legitimate foreign policy from outbursts and uninformed bluster.
There's no good cop/bad cop play here. Trump took the narrative that the Iranian deal was a bad deal and ran with it all campaign, it's only through the desperate efforts of his cabinet that he's stayed in.
The problem with the "renegotiate" idea is that Trump has no leverage. It took Obama years to get Europe on board with the sanctions, if Trump decertifies the US sanctions come back but no one else will follow and Iran will be free to develop break-out capability again.
That's not saying the Trump can't negotiate other things with Iran (stop supporting X we'll stop sanctioning Y) but there's no better Nuclear deal to be had.
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that NK has to take a break from Nuclear tests since they literally nuked their Nuclear test site into oblivion.
The thing to remember is that NK cares about the survival of the regime above all else. Kim Jong Un has no intention of denuclearization or re-unification.
I suspect his end game is Nukes, a mostly closed border, no US army on his doorstep, and no one trying to orchestrate regime change.
If the US, South Korea, and China are happy with that the war can probably end.
I suspect Tesla's method of using less hardware will be the main path in 15 years for autonomy, once we have car to car communications and car to traffic control communications as standard equipment in every vehicle and bugs worked out. Some cars with humans or lasers can communicate safe passages and routes through construction, and other road conditions (wet/ice/snow...) And lesser equipped cars can then navigate recently validated routes more safely.
But now the NTSB is very likely going to step into national standards for autonomy, and it doesn't appear Tesla is ready to meet the likely minimum standard, such as redundant navigation (operate without GPS, or without optical recognition.) and redundant systems.
Hardware only gets cheaper, the future of self-driving cars is more and redundant sensors. And no car is going to rely on another car to tell it what is a safe route.
What you're asking for is not a new word, but for the public to understand a nuance of something they don't frankly give a shit about. A new word is just as likely to be misunderstood/misused by I-can't-be-arsed-to-report-precisely journalists and bloggers, and far more likely to actually ADD confusion.
Face it: words like 'hack' 'drone' and 'troll' have vanished into the collective linguistics of the culture; we're no longer able to recover them and insist they still have the specificity of meaning they used to carry when used by insiders in the tech culture.
There's certainly times when there's overlap or ambiguity, but in general the people hacking databases and the people hacking together cool arduino projects are fundamentally different groups and I think the public does care about that.
However, I do agree that there's no point trying to reclaim "hacker", the public has defined it their own way and we're not going to get them to redefine it. But we can certainly figure out something else to call the non-malicious hobbyists who are doing cool stuff.
The paper addresses this geological impact paradox. For the signal to be obvious in the geological record, it has to be sustained, but for a civilization to persist long enough to be obvious in geological time scales, they have to be in equilibrium with the environment.
If you're talking about bronze age or even iron age civilizations sure. But the summary mentioned industrial civilizations, perhaps something technologically equivalent with ourselves, in which case they're going to use a lot of resources, and that's going to show up both in the weird stuff deposited into that geological layer, but also the stuff they mined from lower layers.
I did a really brief skimming of the paper, they seemed to think that if an ancient advanced civilization was out there so would the evidence (though we haven't deliberately looked for it yet).
Teslas don't work in the winter, they are too expensive and nobody buys them, there is no way to charge them on any sort of reasonable road trip, they won't work for me because I commute 500 miles every day, and they're just propped up by the government anyway. Add to this that they can't manufacture them in volume, they will run out of batteries, they'll run out of the raw materials for the batteries, and nobody wants them anyway, and look at all the recalls!
My ICE doesn't drop down to 90% capacity after 160,000 miles. This is just proof that Tesla will never be successful, and there's no reason for us to keep talking about them.
Tesla. Is. Dead.
(Did I hit all of the hater points, or did I miss one or two?)
I actually think you only hit half a hater point, the rest are new to me.
The one you got half-right is the recalls, which is related to the recent Tesla production issues, basically Tesla is still a new entrant to a very old industry. Re-inventing the car manufacturing process (as any new entrant must do) means you're going to make a bunch of screw ups along the way. Some will show up as production delays, others as recalls when the cars start breaking down in ways they don't expect.
But the real big "hater point" is the auto-pilot, which they're promoting to be far more safe and capable than it really is. If it weren't for the auto-pilot I'd still be a big Tesla fan, but I have very little patience for selling a fake self-driving car just so you can go down as first in the record books.
...is still communism. Transferring vast amounts of wealth from the corporations and wealthy to the common people for the common good always sounds like a great idea in theory. But the practical results have pretty consistently proven disastrous.
Humans seem to need motivation to work and achieve. They need to feel like a big reward is possible, even if it's practically out of reach for most people. Penalizing success to give everyone more motivation to do the bare minimum is ultimately unhealthy for most societies (beyond a certain point anyway). No one disputes that we should have a social safety net for the old and infirm certainly, but a universal income for even the young and healthy only encourages a type of social stagnation.
I don't know enough about UBA, but not only is UBI fundamentally different than communism but you also misunderstand the true flaws of communism.
Communism failed because of the disconnect between information and incentives, an economy is simply too complex to plan centrally and it's really hard to design incentives that motivate people towards the desired outcome.
Soviet workers weren't demotivated because they thought they wouldn't get rich, they were demotivated because they could see how much their labour was wasted.
In our economy, outside of a few entrepreneurs and managers no one works in hope of a big reward, they work because of a consistent salary, sense of purpose and camaraderie with their co-workers, and hopes of a moderate reward from slightly more pay.
And "penalizing success" is one of the most nonsensical concepts I've heard. Like all those people who say "oh! I'd work X times as hard if they paid me Y times more!". It's nonsense, motivation is based on relative compensation, your absolute compensation has nothing to do with your motivation to work.
Just think about your grandparents, not only do you make several times what they do in absolute dollar amounts, but you can buy things they never dreamt of and travel places they couldn't imagine. By any measure you're much wealthier than them but you don't actually work any harder than your grandparents or the poor subsistence farmer in Africa.
People don't work to be wealthy in absolute terms, they work to be wealthier than their neighbours, which means we could tax the rich 90% of their excess wealth and they'd still work just as hard to make more than their slightly less rich friends.
Now I do agree UBI raises the rewards of unemployment. Though I don't know if we'd see people dropping out of the labour force as much as we see a lot of people as the bottom of the income spectrum transitioning towards part-time employment. The critical thing is you still need to work if you want to make more than your neighbour, and that's going to keep the best workers in the labour force.
Seriously, we have been at war in the Middle East for decades for one reason: energy. It's why we had Gulf War I, Gulf War II, and so many others. Fun fact, did you know the reason we refuse to withdraw from Syria despite the fact that ISIS has been defeated is energy? Yup. A proposed pipeline to supply from Qatar to Europe would weaken Russian influence. That's why we can't stop making war there. So let's not trot out the fiction that energy has nothing to do with national security, because it absolutely does.
And what does that have to do with promoting domestically produced Coal and Nuclear over domestically produced Natural Gas and renewables?
AFAIK pretty much every instance of that ever happening is just someone getting confused by a form.
Right, when the form said "are you a citizen" they just happened to get confused.
You've seriously never seen someone confused by a form before? Particularly if it's not in their first language and the person walking them through the process doesn't realize they're not a citizen so gives them bad advice?
Then they got even more confused, took the wrong bus, ended up at the polling booth instead of the local Walmart and, in their ongoing confusion, accidentally cast a ballot instead of buying a pair of shoes.
So most of the ones who accidentally register to vote don't vote. But again, people get confused. Perhaps they're a legal long-term resident who isn't sure if they're a citizen or not, or they think legal long-term residents are allowed to vote, or they didn't realize they screwed up the paperwork, so when the government sent them a card and told them to go vote they listened and tried to vote.
Your country has I don't know how many tens of millions of legal non-citizens, you really think a few won't mix up the paperwork?
Yes, I don't want a tax cut, I want to have less money to spend, I like having the government take all of my money! And I like driving companies out of the country with super high taxation so we don't have any jobs! Yes, Americans just LOVE our taxes because we want to give up everything to the government to give to a bunch of illegal aliens who steal our jobs!
So there's a couple things to unpack here.
First, it's not really a tax cut, not in the long term. See a tax cut in the long term raises the deficit in the long term, but the only way to pass a Senate bill without 60 votes is the Byrd rule, which states you can't raise the deficit long term.
So how is that done?
Well, in the short term taxes are cut for everyone, but after 10 years the taxes go up on individuals to pay for the tax cuts to corporations!
Second, it doesn't matter if it was a tax cut for everyone, where do you think the government gets its money from anyways? It comes from people, either rich people paying corporate and individual taxes, or ordinary people paying mostly individual taxes. And it goes into government expenditures.
So when you cut corporate taxes that money now going to rich people needs to come from somewhere else:
1) Individual rates go up in the present to pay for it (this is happening a bit). 2) Corporate and/or individual rates go up in the future to pay for it (this is also happening). 3) Inflation increases to make the money less valuable (this will probably happen). 4) The government cuts back on services (this has also happened).
The Nords also have much more impedance between the government and "the will of the people". America has weak political parties, and the smoke filled back rooms are long gone. The people get what they want, whether that is bread and circuses, or trillion dollar tax cuts
The American people didn't want the tax cut, it was actually pretty unpopular. Major GOP donors wanted the tax cut.
That's also why the US doesn't have Universal Healthcare or DACA despite both being popular policies.
The US does have weak parties, but the result isn't the public pulling the strings, it's donors and lobbyists. If the US had stronger parties they'd be free to spurn special interests and do what the public wants.
Supply and demand in the labor market combined with the jobs having a low barrier to entry skill wise. All it takes is for people to not take the jobs at the price and under the conditions supplied, but obviously plenty of people are willing to do the work for the pay Amazon is paying.
One of the ideas of a UBI is people will work jobs with really crappy wages and have their income supplemented by the government.
No. One of the ideas of a UBI is people will have their income supplemented by the taxpayers. The government generates no income.
Cue the pedantic libertarian making what they think is an insightful comment but in reality adding no useful input to the conversation.
UBI is a much cleaner fix, if everyone gets $25k/year you don't need a minimum wage at all, Amazon can offer $5/hour
Ignoring what that would do to inflation and the impossible math of funding the scheme,
I'm not sure the cost would be that prohibitive, sure it's a massive new expenditure, but you get to jettison a lot of the social safety net. And I don't think inflation would be a concern either since you can get back the $25k through taxes on higher earners.
if people were paid $25k/yr to sit on their ass, businesses (including Amazon) would have to offer some pretty decent salaries to attract workers.
I've yet to see anything resembling a workable implementation of UBI, but the idea of meeting the basic needs of some of the population without them having to work, would tip the supply-and-demand scales into a more favorable position for those who were willing to work (better choice of available jobs, and higher pay).
The catch is, businesses don't want that situation. They want the job applications to come piling in every time a menial, unskilled, entry-level position opens up. From the perspective of a business, cheap labor is a good thing.
I suspect the vast majority of people working now would keep working, the main effect would be more early retirements and a few more young people trying startups or avoiding McJobs. I suspect you get an overall drag on the economy, but it might be made up some by better job matching and more entrepreneurship.
Plus, I suspect a lot of people who would drop out of the labour force aren't good workers anyhow.
That's simply not true. The Trump campaign didn't use Cambridge Analytica data, they used RNC data, which was more accurate.
Cambridge Analytica did digital advertising on behalf of Trump and a pro-Trump PAC, and they would have used Cambridge Analytica data to do that.
So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.
Huh? Cambridge Analytica is a really scuzzy company and a possible link between Russia and the Trump campaign. They're hardly "the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election".
I don't know. The ones we most commonly know about are the ones who registered as themselves but lied about being citizens.
AFAIK pretty much every instance of that ever happening is just someone getting confused by a form.
Those are, however, also the ones who are most likely to be caught (they're making it pretty easy) so we can't really draw any conclusions about whether that's actually the most common type.
Either way, all the various methods of voter fraud could be stymied by voter ID laws which verify both the identity and the citizenship status of the person who actually casts the ballot.
Then you need a completely different set of voter ID laws because they all accept a Driver's License and other forms of photo ID that do not prove citizenship. If any of your non-citizens managed to register they can just walk up to the polling station, pull out their Driver's License, and vote.
All voter ID laws do is prove that the person at the polling station is whom they claim to be. They prevent nothing except voter impersonation, a crime which by any meaningful measure does not happen.
There's no conspiracy, it's just how the media works.
2 years ago everybody knew that organizations were mining FB data to push agendas and the News Feeds were rife with misinformation, but it just looked like some weird geek issue and nothing had happened to demonstrate why that might be a problem.
But now we've seen a major electoral upset, and both data mining and misinformation played a role, so people now understand how these abstract FB problems can have real world effects.
So now the news orgs want to send reporters to look into FB and ordinary people want to read about it, and that's why all these stories are coming out.
Poor minorities who tend to vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack government issued IDs.
Having a valid government issued ID is also a pre-requisite to work legally in the United States. So instead of whining about lost votes, you could also argue for a federal law that provides no or low-cost ID options to low-income households.
Arguing that there is no need to use ID when voting is equal to arguing that there should be no border controls: now those poor, poor minorities are not even able to go to Canada. And I'm not even mentioning that they can't legally buy alcohol until they're 30. Are you going to stand in front of your local Bevmo with a sign?
I do agree with you that not having ID is a problem for those who don't have one, but that is the problem that needs to be fixed. Not having an ID causes a shitton of issue, and not being able to vote should be the least of their worries.
I have an overwhelming suspicion that the moment you get all the minorities photo IDs the GOP suddenly stops caring about it.
So yes, the Florida election was stolen by exactly the anti-Democratic voter suppression tactics for which you are now advocating!
For the record, being an immigrant I'm a left-leaning moderate. I'm an favor of universal healthcare and free education. I don't like the policies of our current Supreme Leader. I never liked Bush Jr (Sr was a bit better). I liked Obama and would vote for him with my eyes closed.
BUT. You can not have democracy without fair elections, and showing proof of eligibility to vote is one of the necessary safeguards.
I understand why it sounds like a reasonable safeguard, but until you get everyone photo IDs you will end up disenfranchising eligible voters.
And the only thing that photo IDs fix is in-person voter impersonation at the polls, but if that kind of voter fraud were happening at a large scale we'd see the signs, and they're simply not there.
You're advocating a policy that will disenfranchise people to fix a problem that is not happening.
Really, if you're that concerned about the integrity of the vote go after mail-in ballots, there is way more potential for not only voter impersonation but coerced votes as well.
But you'll never hear about trying to take away absentee voting, largely because absentee voting skews Republican.
This is one of the main arguments for the left pushing "Fight for $15." If you're working for minimum wage, then you qualify for food stamps and other government assistance, so the government is essentially subsidizing employers who pay minimum wage.
Here's the math: The federal minimum wage is $7.25. If you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's $14,500 a year. The Amazon wage listed in the summary of $24,300 correlates with $11.68/hour for 40 hours/50 weeks. Of course, the Amazon hourly rate is probably lower, but with overtime depending on demand.
The problem is at a certain wage level those employees are no longer profitable to hire. It's not clear what that level is, most employers would likely pay a wage higher than most libertarians realize, but at a certain point low-skilled workers start getting pushed out of the market. I suspect a $10 minimum wage wouldn't put many people out of work, $12 is probably fine, but even economists who want a minimum wage hike worry that $15 will put a lot of people out of work.
UBI is a much cleaner fix, if everyone gets $25k/year you don't need a minimum wage at all, Amazon can offer $5/hour and you don't need to worry about exploitation since no one needs to work there to survive. But in the short term a bump to $10 probably helps everyone, including the Amazon employees since everyone offering close to the minimum wage now needs to pay more to compete.
Supply and demand in the labor market combined with the jobs having a low barrier to entry skill wise. All it takes is for people to not take the jobs at the price and under the conditions supplied, but obviously plenty of people are willing to do the work for the pay Amazon is paying.
Agreed, these workers are a victim of the fact that if you don't have any special skills there's not a lot of ways for you to contribute to a modern economy. Amazon is just unusual in that they have an unusual number of such positions available.
If anything the I'm glad they're at least getting Food Stamps. One of the ideas of a UBI is people will work jobs with really crappy wages and have their income supplemented by the government.
Who the hell is talking about impersonating anyone?
Do you even know how voting works?
Ok, lets back up a moment.
Explain to me exactly how you think non-citizens are voting in US elections. For instance, are they registering and voting as themselves? Are registering as other people and voting as those people. Are they not even registering and picking a random name off the roles, etc, etc.
Then the shareholders and investors own the shame, too. Not that many would care, I agree. But take a look at this example, where investors urge Apple to do more to protect children from smartphone addiction. Such things could have potential impact to "profit", but one could reasonably state that it's the right thing to do.
I doubt the investors think there's any real risk to their bottom lines. The moment there's money to be made it's easy to rationalize an action. In this case it's actually pretty easy, the drug was priced based not on raw materials but to recoup R&D + profit. So if people suddenly discover the correct dosage is only 1/3rd as much as before then the correct action is to triple the price of the product. Heck, it means your product was 3x as effective as people thought!
People hold up Shkreli as the poster boy but he's really a distraction making people think the problem is that sociopaths are in change. The problem is that capitalism is a terrible system with which to deliver health care, pharmaceuticals included.
I'm tired of Republicans pretending this is a legitimate concern and not a disingenuous ploy to
I'm not a republican. I'm not even allowed to vote in U.S. elections.
Well then you've just been snookered by them.
prevent U.S. Citizens from legally voting because they don't have government issued IDs.
If you don't understand that it is necessary to verify that right at the polls, then you are either extremely dumb or just a troll.
Poor minorities who tend to vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack government issued IDs. This is entirely the reason the Republican party pushes this narrative, to suppress the legal Democratic vote.
Of course, they've been pushing the voter fraud angle so long that a lot of the rank-and-fie are starting to believe it.
Which begs the obvious question, do you have the slightest bit of credible evidence that non U.S. Citizens voting in significant numbers is a problem?
Sure, just look here. This was a difference of 537 votes. Is that significant enough for you? Now obviously I don't know whether they were "illegal" votes or not, but my point is that ~500 can make the difference between an election swinging one way or the other. And that makes it pretty clear to me that every vote counts.
All you've shown is that if there were an illegal voting plot in Florida it could have worked in that one exceptionally close election. You still don't have a shred of evidence that there were actual illegal voters voting in Florida.
Though, on the topic of voter suppression which IS the actual motive of voter ID. We do know that a bunch of legal voters were accidentally disenfranchised because they shared names with felons, and we do know that if these people had been allowed to vote they would have mostly been Democratic votes.
So yes, the Florida election was stolen by exactly the anti-Democratic voter suppression tactics for which you are now advocating!
As the summary points out the images were made up as part of a lawsuit filed by conspiracy theorists against the NSA in 1996.
Do you really think a modern 'Psycho-Electric Weapons' project is going to be using crappy drawings made by conspiracy theorists who sued the government 22 years ago?
The source of the images isn't someone working on Psycho-Electric Weapons, it's a government employee who happens to believe in conspiracy theories (or at least downloads their stuff).
That person downloaded the zip file onto their computer from some conspiracy theory site. And then during the FOIA request that doc got included either by accident or as a joke.
Slashdot Mirror
As long as he can blast Seoul into rubble (and he can) I just don't see him needing them. He's got plenty of deterrent right there. It's not like the Israelis who, thanks to anti-Semites and their deeply rooted hate (boarding on psychosis), have to worry about nut cases rolling in to exterminate them and just not caring about conventional weaponry. The NK/SK dynamic has always been a hostage situation. It's odd that the media never really talks about it. Then again like I said we're shopping around for our next big war. Looks like NK is out of the running. Syria & Iran are next up.
You're always a bit braver when the gun is pointed at your head instead of your neighbour's.
The artillery is a good deterrent, but not a great one when the US and China are your biggest threats. NK needs long range nukes if it wants to make sure that one of the giants doesn't decide they can "probably" solve the Kim problem without risking Seoul.
Trump surrounded NK with carriers and flew bombers off the coast. Moreover there are hard hitting sanctions that are harming Kim's ability to keep bribing his generals. This could have been done decades ago, but globalists find North Korea useful as a source of tension. The fact that millions suffer means nothing to them. Trump brought Kim to the table, but naturally nobody wants to give him credit because he's Hitler.
Kim wanted Nukes that could hit the US. Kim got Nukes that could hit the US. Therefore, Kim is ready to talk.
While I don't think the tweets were helpful, Trump did push for tougher sanctions against North Korea. Meanwhile, Trump also offered to engage in direct talks with North Korea, something past presidents have refused to do. North Korea has walked to negotiate directly with the United States, while previous presidents have insisted that any negotiations should be part of the six party talks. Trump stepped up the pressure, calling it "maximum pressure", while offering North Korea something the direct negotiations they wanted and a possible way out of the sanctions. Both the United States and South Korea have been clear that denuclearization is necessary to get the sanctions lifted. That is a substantial difference from the strategy of past presidents, and is a logical approach to foreign policy.
The tougher sanctions likely had a significant impact on North Korea and made them more willing to negotiate. Trump's willingness for direct talks signaled a willingness for unprecedented direct talks. The tweets weren't helpful, but Trump's foreign policy did influence North Korea to make real concessions. Trump should get credit for that, and you're ignoring the real substance of his foreign policy.
I was thinking that originally but now I'm not sure it has anything to do with Trump.
NK is pursuing the same thing now it's always pursued, survival.
Previously this took the form of gaining deterrence, first artillery, then Nukes, and finally Nukes that can hit the US. Until they had those things they were never going to engage in serious negotiations.
But now they have all those things their deterrence is kinda maxed out, they can always improve their long range delivery, but realistically they've done the important thing which is prove they can deliver a Nuclear retaliation against the US.
NK isn't talking because of sanctions, or because Trump reached out, they're talking because they got what they've always wanted, Nuclear deterrence, and now they want stability. Denuclearization isn't really on the table, but as long as everyone knows they have long range Nukes they're probably content to stop testing.
Let's just hope that Trump's threats to about the Iran nuclear deal are an effort to get Iran to extend their promises past 2025 and not a sincere intent to withdraw. If Trump is taking the role of the bad cop while Macron has the role of the good cop to negotiate more with Iran, it may be effective. If Trump actually withdraws, that's incredibly foolish. Trump is just so erratic that it's hard to distinguish legitimate foreign policy from outbursts and uninformed bluster.
There's no good cop/bad cop play here. Trump took the narrative that the Iranian deal was a bad deal and ran with it all campaign, it's only through the desperate efforts of his cabinet that he's stayed in.
The problem with the "renegotiate" idea is that Trump has no leverage. It took Obama years to get Europe on board with the sanctions, if Trump decertifies the US sanctions come back but no one else will follow and Iran will be free to develop break-out capability again.
That's not saying the Trump can't negotiate other things with Iran (stop supporting X we'll stop sanctioning Y) but there's no better Nuclear deal to be had.
I'm sure this has nothing to do with the fact that NK has to take a break from Nuclear tests since they literally nuked their Nuclear test site into oblivion.
The thing to remember is that NK cares about the survival of the regime above all else. Kim Jong Un has no intention of denuclearization or re-unification.
I suspect his end game is Nukes, a mostly closed border, no US army on his doorstep, and no one trying to orchestrate regime change.
If the US, South Korea, and China are happy with that the war can probably end.
I suspect Tesla's method of using less hardware will be the main path in 15 years for autonomy, once we have car to car communications and car to traffic control communications as standard equipment in every vehicle and bugs worked out. Some cars with humans or lasers can communicate safe passages and routes through construction, and other road conditions (wet/ice/snow...) And lesser equipped cars can then navigate recently validated routes more safely.
But now the NTSB is very likely going to step into national standards for autonomy, and it doesn't appear Tesla is ready to meet the likely minimum standard, such as redundant navigation (operate without GPS, or without optical recognition.) and redundant systems.
Hardware only gets cheaper, the future of self-driving cars is more and redundant sensors. And no car is going to rely on another car to tell it what is a safe route.
What you're asking for is not a new word, but for the public to understand a nuance of something they don't frankly give a shit about. A new word is just as likely to be misunderstood/misused by I-can't-be-arsed-to-report-precisely journalists and bloggers, and far more likely to actually ADD confusion.
Face it: words like 'hack' 'drone' and 'troll' have vanished into the collective linguistics of the culture; we're no longer able to recover them and insist they still have the specificity of meaning they used to carry when used by insiders in the tech culture.
There's certainly times when there's overlap or ambiguity, but in general the people hacking databases and the people hacking together cool arduino projects are fundamentally different groups and I think the public does care about that.
However, I do agree that there's no point trying to reclaim "hacker", the public has defined it their own way and we're not going to get them to redefine it. But we can certainly figure out something else to call the non-malicious hobbyists who are doing cool stuff.
The paper addresses this geological impact paradox. For the signal to be obvious in the geological record, it has to be sustained, but for a civilization to persist long enough to be obvious in geological time scales, they have to be in equilibrium with the environment.
If you're talking about bronze age or even iron age civilizations sure. But the summary mentioned industrial civilizations, perhaps something technologically equivalent with ourselves, in which case they're going to use a lot of resources, and that's going to show up both in the weird stuff deposited into that geological layer, but also the stuff they mined from lower layers.
I did a really brief skimming of the paper, they seemed to think that if an ancient advanced civilization was out there so would the evidence (though we haven't deliberately looked for it yet).
Teslas don't work in the winter, they are too expensive and nobody buys them, there is no way to charge them on any sort of reasonable road trip, they won't work for me because I commute 500 miles every day, and they're just propped up by the government anyway. Add to this that they can't manufacture them in volume, they will run out of batteries, they'll run out of the raw materials for the batteries, and nobody wants them anyway, and look at all the recalls!
My ICE doesn't drop down to 90% capacity after 160,000 miles. This is just proof that Tesla will never be successful, and there's no reason for us to keep talking about them.
Tesla. Is. Dead.
(Did I hit all of the hater points, or did I miss one or two?)
I actually think you only hit half a hater point, the rest are new to me.
The one you got half-right is the recalls, which is related to the recent Tesla production issues, basically Tesla is still a new entrant to a very old industry. Re-inventing the car manufacturing process (as any new entrant must do) means you're going to make a bunch of screw ups along the way. Some will show up as production delays, others as recalls when the cars start breaking down in ways they don't expect.
But the real big "hater point" is the auto-pilot, which they're promoting to be far more safe and capable than it really is. If it weren't for the auto-pilot I'd still be a big Tesla fan, but I have very little patience for selling a fake self-driving car just so you can go down as first in the record books.
...is still communism. Transferring vast amounts of wealth from the corporations and wealthy to the common people for the common good always sounds like a great idea in theory. But the practical results have pretty consistently proven disastrous.
Humans seem to need motivation to work and achieve. They need to feel like a big reward is possible, even if it's practically out of reach for most people. Penalizing success to give everyone more motivation to do the bare minimum is ultimately unhealthy for most societies (beyond a certain point anyway). No one disputes that we should have a social safety net for the old and infirm certainly, but a universal income for even the young and healthy only encourages a type of social stagnation.
I don't know enough about UBA, but not only is UBI fundamentally different than communism but you also misunderstand the true flaws of communism.
Communism failed because of the disconnect between information and incentives, an economy is simply too complex to plan centrally and it's really hard to design incentives that motivate people towards the desired outcome.
Soviet workers weren't demotivated because they thought they wouldn't get rich, they were demotivated because they could see how much their labour was wasted.
In our economy, outside of a few entrepreneurs and managers no one works in hope of a big reward, they work because of a consistent salary, sense of purpose and camaraderie with their co-workers, and hopes of a moderate reward from slightly more pay.
And "penalizing success" is one of the most nonsensical concepts I've heard. Like all those people who say "oh! I'd work X times as hard if they paid me Y times more!". It's nonsense, motivation is based on relative compensation, your absolute compensation has nothing to do with your motivation to work.
Just think about your grandparents, not only do you make several times what they do in absolute dollar amounts, but you can buy things they never dreamt of and travel places they couldn't imagine. By any measure you're much wealthier than them but you don't actually work any harder than your grandparents or the poor subsistence farmer in Africa.
People don't work to be wealthy in absolute terms, they work to be wealthier than their neighbours, which means we could tax the rich 90% of their excess wealth and they'd still work just as hard to make more than their slightly less rich friends.
Now I do agree UBI raises the rewards of unemployment. Though I don't know if we'd see people dropping out of the labour force as much as we see a lot of people as the bottom of the income spectrum transitioning towards part-time employment. The critical thing is you still need to work if you want to make more than your neighbour, and that's going to keep the best workers in the labour force.
Seriously, we have been at war in the Middle East for decades for one reason: energy. It's why we had Gulf War I, Gulf War II, and so many others. Fun fact, did you know the reason we refuse to withdraw from Syria despite the fact that ISIS has been defeated is energy? Yup. A proposed pipeline to supply from Qatar to Europe would weaken Russian influence. That's why we can't stop making war there. So let's not trot out the fiction that energy has nothing to do with national security, because it absolutely does.
And what does that have to do with promoting domestically produced Coal and Nuclear over domestically produced Natural Gas and renewables?
AFAIK pretty much every instance of that ever happening is just someone getting confused by a form.
Right, when the form said "are you a citizen" they just happened to get confused.
You've seriously never seen someone confused by a form before? Particularly if it's not in their first language and the person walking them through the process doesn't realize they're not a citizen so gives them bad advice?
Then they got even more confused, took the wrong bus, ended up at the polling booth instead of the local Walmart and, in their ongoing confusion, accidentally cast a ballot instead of buying a pair of shoes.
So most of the ones who accidentally register to vote don't vote. But again, people get confused. Perhaps they're a legal long-term resident who isn't sure if they're a citizen or not, or they think legal long-term residents are allowed to vote, or they didn't realize they screwed up the paperwork, so when the government sent them a card and told them to go vote they listened and tried to vote.
Your country has I don't know how many tens of millions of legal non-citizens, you really think a few won't mix up the paperwork?
Yes, I don't want a tax cut, I want to have less money to spend, I like having the government take all of my money! And I like driving companies out of the country with super high taxation so we don't have any jobs! Yes, Americans just LOVE our taxes because we want to give up everything to the government to give to a bunch of illegal aliens who steal our jobs!
So there's a couple things to unpack here.
First, it's not really a tax cut, not in the long term. See a tax cut in the long term raises the deficit in the long term, but the only way to pass a Senate bill without 60 votes is the Byrd rule, which states you can't raise the deficit long term.
So how is that done?
Well, in the short term taxes are cut for everyone, but after 10 years the taxes go up on individuals to pay for the tax cuts to corporations!
Second, it doesn't matter if it was a tax cut for everyone, where do you think the government gets its money from anyways? It comes from people, either rich people paying corporate and individual taxes, or ordinary people paying mostly individual taxes. And it goes into government expenditures.
So when you cut corporate taxes that money now going to rich people needs to come from somewhere else:
1) Individual rates go up in the present to pay for it (this is happening a bit).
2) Corporate and/or individual rates go up in the future to pay for it (this is also happening).
3) Inflation increases to make the money less valuable (this will probably happen).
4) The government cuts back on services (this has also happened).
The Nords also have much more impedance between the government and "the will of the people". America has weak political parties, and the smoke filled back rooms are long gone. The people get what they want, whether that is bread and circuses, or trillion dollar tax cuts
The American people didn't want the tax cut, it was actually pretty unpopular. Major GOP donors wanted the tax cut.
That's also why the US doesn't have Universal Healthcare or DACA despite both being popular policies.
The US does have weak parties, but the result isn't the public pulling the strings, it's donors and lobbyists. If the US had stronger parties they'd be free to spurn special interests and do what the public wants.
Why is it the worst jobs pay the least?
Supply and demand in the labor market combined with the jobs having a low barrier to entry skill wise. All it takes is for people to not take the jobs at the price and under the conditions supplied, but obviously plenty of people are willing to do the work for the pay Amazon is paying.
One of the ideas of a UBI is people will work jobs with really crappy wages and have their income supplemented by the government.
No. One of the ideas of a UBI is people will have their income supplemented by the taxpayers. The government generates no income.
Cue the pedantic libertarian making what they think is an insightful comment but in reality adding no useful input to the conversation.
UBI is a much cleaner fix, if everyone gets $25k/year you don't need a minimum wage at all, Amazon can offer $5/hour
Ignoring what that would do to inflation and the impossible math of funding the scheme,
I'm not sure the cost would be that prohibitive, sure it's a massive new expenditure, but you get to jettison a lot of the social safety net. And I don't think inflation would be a concern either since you can get back the $25k through taxes on higher earners.
if people were paid $25k/yr to sit on their ass, businesses (including Amazon) would have to offer some pretty decent salaries to attract workers.
I've yet to see anything resembling a workable implementation of UBI, but the idea of meeting the basic needs of some of the population without them having to work, would tip the supply-and-demand scales into a more favorable position for those who were willing to work (better choice of available jobs, and higher pay).
The catch is, businesses don't want that situation. They want the job applications to come piling in every time a menial, unskilled, entry-level position opens up. From the perspective of a business, cheap labor is a good thing.
I suspect the vast majority of people working now would keep working, the main effect would be more early retirements and a few more young people trying startups or avoiding McJobs. I suspect you get an overall drag on the economy, but it might be made up some by better job matching and more entrepreneurship.
Plus, I suspect a lot of people who would drop out of the labour force aren't good workers anyhow.
That's simply not true. The Trump campaign didn't use Cambridge Analytica data, they used RNC data, which was more accurate.
Cambridge Analytica did digital advertising on behalf of Trump and a pro-Trump PAC, and they would have used Cambridge Analytica data to do that.
So, after a year of investigations and debunked conspiracy / false claim after debunked conspiracy / false claim, the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election is $100K of non-political or partisan Facebook ads - more than half of which ran after the election, and a quarter of which never ran at all. That's telling.
Huh? Cambridge Analytica is a really scuzzy company and a possible link between Russia and the Trump campaign. They're hardly "the strongest argument for alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US federal election".
I don't know. The ones we most commonly know about are the ones who registered as themselves but lied about being citizens.
AFAIK pretty much every instance of that ever happening is just someone getting confused by a form.
Those are, however, also the ones who are most likely to be caught (they're making it pretty easy) so we can't really draw any conclusions about whether that's actually the most common type.
Either way, all the various methods of voter fraud could be stymied by voter ID laws which verify both the identity and the citizenship status of the person who actually casts the ballot.
Then you need a completely different set of voter ID laws because they all accept a Driver's License and other forms of photo ID that do not prove citizenship. If any of your non-citizens managed to register they can just walk up to the polling station, pull out their Driver's License, and vote.
All voter ID laws do is prove that the person at the polling station is whom they claim to be. They prevent nothing except voter impersonation, a crime which by any meaningful measure does not happen.
I mean, six months ago there weren't these constant drumbeats of anti-facebook stories. Now they're everywhere. Is this tied to the idea that Zuckerberg wants to run for President? The well is being poisoned so he won't pose a threat?
There's no conspiracy, it's just how the media works.
2 years ago everybody knew that organizations were mining FB data to push agendas and the News Feeds were rife with misinformation, but it just looked like some weird geek issue and nothing had happened to demonstrate why that might be a problem.
But now we've seen a major electoral upset, and both data mining and misinformation played a role, so people now understand how these abstract FB problems can have real world effects.
So now the news orgs want to send reporters to look into FB and ordinary people want to read about it, and that's why all these stories are coming out.
Poor minorities who tend to vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack government issued IDs.
Having a valid government issued ID is also a pre-requisite to work legally in the United States. So instead of whining about lost votes, you could also argue for a federal law that provides no or low-cost ID options to low-income households.
Arguing that there is no need to use ID when voting is equal to arguing that there should be no border controls: now those poor, poor minorities are not even able to go to Canada. And I'm not even mentioning that they can't legally buy alcohol until they're 30. Are you going to stand in front of your local Bevmo with a sign?
Money isn't the only issue and whatever the cause there is a big discrepancy.
I do agree with you that not having ID is a problem for those who don't have one, but that is the problem that needs to be fixed. Not having an ID causes a shitton of issue, and not being able to vote should be the least of their worries.
I wouldn't have an issue if every legal voter had an ID, though getting minorities IDs isn't a Republican priority and they seem to actively make it more difficult.
I have an overwhelming suspicion that the moment you get all the minorities photo IDs the GOP suddenly stops caring about it.
So yes, the Florida election was stolen by exactly the anti-Democratic voter suppression tactics for which you are now advocating!
For the record, being an immigrant I'm a left-leaning moderate. I'm an favor of universal healthcare and free education. I don't like the policies of our current Supreme Leader. I never liked Bush Jr (Sr was a bit better). I liked Obama and would vote for him with my eyes closed.
BUT. You can not have democracy without fair elections, and showing proof of eligibility to vote is one of the necessary safeguards.
I understand why it sounds like a reasonable safeguard, but until you get everyone photo IDs you will end up disenfranchising eligible voters.
And the only thing that photo IDs fix is in-person voter impersonation at the polls, but if that kind of voter fraud were happening at a large scale we'd see the signs, and they're simply not there.
You're advocating a policy that will disenfranchise people to fix a problem that is not happening.
Really, if you're that concerned about the integrity of the vote go after mail-in ballots, there is way more potential for not only voter impersonation but coerced votes as well.
But you'll never hear about trying to take away absentee voting, largely because absentee voting skews Republican.
This is one of the main arguments for the left pushing "Fight for $15." If you're working for minimum wage, then you qualify for food stamps and other government assistance, so the government is essentially subsidizing employers who pay minimum wage.
Here's the math: The federal minimum wage is $7.25. If you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, that's $14,500 a year. The Amazon wage listed in the summary of $24,300 correlates with $11.68/hour for 40 hours/50 weeks. Of course, the Amazon hourly rate is probably lower, but with overtime depending on demand.
The problem is at a certain wage level those employees are no longer profitable to hire. It's not clear what that level is, most employers would likely pay a wage higher than most libertarians realize, but at a certain point low-skilled workers start getting pushed out of the market. I suspect a $10 minimum wage wouldn't put many people out of work, $12 is probably fine, but even economists who want a minimum wage hike worry that $15 will put a lot of people out of work.
UBI is a much cleaner fix, if everyone gets $25k/year you don't need a minimum wage at all, Amazon can offer $5/hour and you don't need to worry about exploitation since no one needs to work there to survive. But in the short term a bump to $10 probably helps everyone, including the Amazon employees since everyone offering close to the minimum wage now needs to pay more to compete.
Why is it the worst jobs pay the least?
Supply and demand in the labor market combined with the jobs having a low barrier to entry skill wise. All it takes is for people to not take the jobs at the price and under the conditions supplied, but obviously plenty of people are willing to do the work for the pay Amazon is paying.
Agreed, these workers are a victim of the fact that if you don't have any special skills there's not a lot of ways for you to contribute to a modern economy. Amazon is just unusual in that they have an unusual number of such positions available.
If anything the I'm glad they're at least getting Food Stamps. One of the ideas of a UBI is people will work jobs with really crappy wages and have their income supplemented by the government.
Who the hell is talking about impersonating anyone?
Do you even know how voting works?
Ok, lets back up a moment.
Explain to me exactly how you think non-citizens are voting in US elections.
For instance, are they registering and voting as themselves? Are registering as other people and voting as those people. Are they not even registering and picking a random name off the roles, etc, etc.
Then the shareholders and investors own the shame, too. Not that many would care, I agree. But take a look at this example, where investors urge Apple to do more to protect children from smartphone addiction. Such things could have potential impact to "profit", but one could reasonably state that it's the right thing to do.
I doubt the investors think there's any real risk to their bottom lines. The moment there's money to be made it's easy to rationalize an action. In this case it's actually pretty easy, the drug was priced based not on raw materials but to recoup R&D + profit. So if people suddenly discover the correct dosage is only 1/3rd as much as before then the correct action is to triple the price of the product. Heck, it means your product was 3x as effective as people thought!
People hold up Shkreli as the poster boy but he's really a distraction making people think the problem is that sociopaths are in change. The problem is that capitalism is a terrible system with which to deliver health care, pharmaceuticals included.
I'm tired of Republicans pretending this is a legitimate concern and not a disingenuous ploy to
I'm not a republican. I'm not even allowed to vote in U.S. elections.
Well then you've just been snookered by them.
prevent U.S. Citizens from legally voting because they don't have government issued IDs.
If you don't understand that it is necessary to verify that right at the polls, then you are either extremely dumb or just a troll.
Poor minorities who tend to vote Democrat are disproportionately likely to lack government issued IDs. This is entirely the reason the Republican party pushes this narrative, to suppress the legal Democratic vote.
Of course, they've been pushing the voter fraud angle so long that a lot of the rank-and-fie are starting to believe it.
Which begs the obvious question, do you have the slightest bit of credible evidence that non U.S. Citizens voting in significant numbers is a problem?
Sure, just look here. This was a difference of 537 votes. Is that significant enough for you? Now obviously I don't know whether they were "illegal" votes or not, but my point is that ~500 can make the difference between an election swinging one way or the other. And that makes it pretty clear to me that every vote counts.
All you've shown is that if there were an illegal voting plot in Florida it could have worked in that one exceptionally close election. You still don't have a shred of evidence that there were actual illegal voters voting in Florida.
Though, on the topic of voter suppression which IS the actual motive of voter ID. We do know that a bunch of legal voters were accidentally disenfranchised because they shared names with felons, and we do know that if these people had been allowed to vote they would have mostly been Democratic votes.
So yes, the Florida election was stolen by exactly the anti-Democratic voter suppression tactics for which you are now advocating!
As the summary points out the images were made up as part of a lawsuit filed by conspiracy theorists against the NSA in 1996.
Do you really think a modern 'Psycho-Electric Weapons' project is going to be using crappy drawings made by conspiracy theorists who sued the government 22 years ago?
The source of the images isn't someone working on Psycho-Electric Weapons, it's a government employee who happens to believe in conspiracy theories (or at least downloads their stuff).
That person downloaded the zip file onto their computer from some conspiracy theory site. And then during the FOIA request that doc got included either by accident or as a joke.