Weatherbug was pretty careful not to make the leap that Florence is a result of climate change. They had an article speculating that the reason Florence became so strong is the result of a Bermuda high which is in an unusual position for the year. The article's author felts that the blocking high was keeping Florence over warmer water so it could strengthen. Typically September hurricanes turn back out to sea.
Think of a coin that's kinda weird aerodynamically so when you flip it it will land heads 70% of the time.
Then you flip the coin 10 times and it lands heads 8 times. That's unlikely with an unbiased coin, but not impossible.
So do you say the bias caused it to land heads 8/10? Do you say it contributed? Do you say we can't really comment at all?
That's the basic discussion climate scientists are having right now.
Screw that! It's not a college dorm room. It's a prison! "Oh, but their rights"...screw that too! Make prisons a place YOU DO NOT want to be, more like the 60's movie "Cool Hand Luke" and maybe they will think twice about breaking the law!
Do you want them to re-offend when they get out or become productive law-abiding citizens? Then treat them fairly, harshly if need be, but fairly. That teaches them that being a productive member of a functioning society pays off.
But being arbitrary and capricious just tells them that the rules don't matter, only power. So when they get out they'll go back to breaking the law because you've failed to show them why the law is just.
The trick is actually just to take up challenges, lead yourself.
This is one of the big lessons I learned going from school to the work force.
In school the assignments always have a solution, the teacher always knows it, and they have a pretty good idea of the best path for you to get there.
In industry, good managers have an idea... but if the task were already solved then there wouldn't be anything for you to do. So if you're assuming the path as laid out will invariably lead to success you're eventually going to hit a brick wall. I've seen this a number of time with co-op students, they really struggle when a minor redesign comes up and changes some characteristic of the task they've been assigned. It's not so much the lack of experience, but they can't quite accept that their assignment as given was flawed.
I've found two things that really help me. First, when I'm confused I start asking questions until things make sense. Sometimes I'm confused because I don't understand the area (and I would have screwed up if I didn't ask questions). But other times the project plan had some serious issue, and asking questions eventually exposed that issue and saved the company some serious money*.
The other thing I've found is a lot of good features and ideas tend to get ignored, and pushing for those features to get implemented (or even doing them on your own if appropriate) can bring a lot of value. As a bonus those tasks tend to be the things you're better at, and you're building a little domain of your expertise into the project.
* In one unfortunate experience I had with a technical manager was on a project involving some functionality I hadn't been exposed to. I didn't have a clear grasp of the concepts so I asked the manager to explain some points and he basically replied "You've been here X years! I don't understand how you don't know this already?" And so I accordingly shut up with my questions.
After a week and a half of several people working on the project another technical manager came back from vacation and started asked me to explain the design, I got to the part that confused me and I explained that it handled it by the functionality working like X, he replied, no, the functionality works like Y, at which point we both realized the project was fatally flawed.
My personal estimation is that we have about 20% people that know what they are doing, at least in IT. (Yes, I know that impostor syndrome refers to people that have external evidence that they are actually competent. But in IT holding a specific position does realistically not provide that evidence, even if a psychologist may believe it does.)
It depends a lot on the organization, but are ~20% of people proper experts with the technology or product they're working on? Probably. That means a good chunk of the remaining 80% keep on running into the boundaries of their knowledge, thinking "hmm, I probably should know this, I bet Bob and Sally know it, it's important for me to perform this task, but it's kinda vague".
Now a lot of them are probably still providing good value, and Bob and Sally might not know after all, but that continual experience sounds like a good recipe for imposter syndrome.
The other aspect is productivity, if I were working 100% engaged for 8 hours a day my productivity would be at least doubled, but I just can't mange that. I kind of assume other people manage it, but they're probably hiding their distractions and lack of engagement the same as I am.
IMHO anybody who sues over stock manipulation should have no net position (outside of a truly blind trust) in the stocks or other financial instruments whose performance might be affected by news of the suit and/or its progress.
If you think they're jacking up the price through misrepresentation you should have sold already since the stock is overvalued so your pointless.
If you believe the CEO is deliberately tanking the stock price you're asking the plaintiff to take a major loss since they're selling the stock for far less than it's worth so your policy is forcing the plaintiff to take a big loss just to file the suit.
I recognize the conflict of interest... but I don't think your policy is a good idea.
Watch the stock sink even quicker for Telsa and go bust by the end of this year?
Or watch the stock dive 'way down, watch Elon buy much of it up with the money he's already cashed out, and end up with a LOT less of the company owned by others.
Is he crazy like The Mad Hatter, or like a fox?
1. Cash out when the price is high. 2. Start acting erratically and tank the value of the stock. 3. Buy back in at the much lower price. 4. Go to prison because that sounds REALLY sketchy and probably illegal.
... And there's still a ridiculous amount of derangement.
Definitely.
Hilldog was a bad candidate who few outside the far left liked.
Hilldog?
She was a crappy candidate in the sense she sucked at campaigning. But her base wasn't the far left, it was policy wonks.
She was caught meddling in her own party's process to boot Bernie. She tried pretending that destroying evidence on her personal email server was an innocent mistake.
The private server was a screw up the violated department regs, but that's all.
And for deleting emails she did exactly what she was supposed to do according to regs, turn over the emails her team deemed work related and then securely delete the server.
The screw up was the IT guy not deleting when the original request was given, but instead deleting when the subpoena came in and he realized "oh crap! I was supposed to delete those months ago!". But there's no evidence that anyone buy the IT guy made that decision (and he got immunity, so he certainly had reason to talk).
Now 2 years later, uncountable hours have gone into trying to shift the blame. When will the Dems admit it was a mistake to have her as the candidate?
Yeah, she was below average as a candidate, to the extent the party encouraged the field to clear out to smooth her nomination it was a major mistake.
But 2 years later you're still whining about Hillary's deficiencies as some sort of excuse for electing the most absurdly awful candidate in history. The rest of the planet is still baffled as to what the hell your country was thinking, Trump as President is barely believable in a script for a slapstick comedy.
Fair Question: Did Clinton meddle in the Russian election?
There are two broad categories of states, functioning Democracies where the leaders can be booted out by the public, and countries where you're going to need a revolution to change leadership.
I'm actually fine with a policy where you should leave the functioning Democracies as is but you're free to screw around with the other countries to make them functioning Democracies since the common thread is you're trying to make the leadership of those countries accountable to the people.
Therefore I'll happily condemn Russian meddling in US elections but encourage US meddling in the Russian theatre productions they call elections. The US meddling in Ukraine is a bit more ambiguous, they were a semi-functioning Democracy but with a leader trying very hard to entrench himself for life. The Ukrainian revolution actually made them a lot closer to a functioning Democracy, which as it turns out was a great motive for Russia to invade them and steal some territory.
And what were the consequences of the tax bill other than a huge economic upshot in the last few months? You may not like a particular policy but there is more at stake than simply giving "rich people a break".
The stock market is doing well because the stock market is based on corporate earnings and corporations just got a massive tax. The economy seems to just be holding steady from Obama, but that might be an illusion since wages have stagnated and some of the recent manufacturing boom is just companies stocking up on supplies before a trade war.
Even if it did cause some economic growth you still need to pay off your bills and not cause a massive hole in the deficit, this is the exact lesson we learned with the Bush tax cuts. You don't get rich by going on a shopping spree.
Per Bernie Sanders and others on the left, rich people and corporations don't pay taxes, so the logical conclusion is that you can't increase or decrease their tax load because they have none.
I don't know if this is supposed to be a joke, hyperbole, or just a really confused statement.
There's a bit of that. But you can't just invoke the 25th when a big portion of the country thinks the leader is doing awesome and the Deep State is planning a coup, it's a recipe for some serious civil unrest (and an even more extreme nominee next time around).
I think the author is trying to build the public case that Trump is unfit. This can help for the 25th, impeachment, the next election, giving congress political cover to pass veto-proof bills to keep Trump in check, or even just forcing a responsible nomination when Sessions get's fired (ie, if the adults in the room are the only ones protecting the country don't let him fire them and staff it with children).
Honestly the most disconcerting thing about this is that the author cites some of the worst things this administration has done as their few "successes" and says they were accomplished despite, not because of, Trump. I think Trump is an amoral buffoon and a disgrace to the nation as much as the author seems to, but I'm honestly a little glad to hear that that buffoon is gumming up the plans of those who want to rape and pillage our country for their own profit, instead of Darth Pence streamlining that process.
That might be only half true, I think a lot of politics is people coming in saying "I want to do X, Y, and Z!" and then they're confronted with all the potential consequences to they end up saying, "Fine, I'll only do x and y". That was one of the big complaints with Obama, where a lot of his policies fell short of his rhetoric. But I thought that was just a consequence of a responsible leader moderating their ideas.
In the US I think the President is the one who's supposed to play that role, they're the one with the legacy and they're the one who's supposed to be responsible for the entire country, not just a particular region or base. But Trump doesn't really care about that other stuff, so when someone comes up saying "I want to do X!" he lets them do "X!" without thinking about the consequences.
For instance, on the tax bill I think a lot of GOP types really wanted to do a big massive corporate tax cut, both for ideological reasons but also to pay back their donors, and they went into the room trying to write a massive tax cut.
A President worried about their legacy and feeling personally accountable for the country's long term welfare probably would have pushed for a more moderate bill, even a President Rubio or Ryan would probably have made a more moderate bill if they were the President and their deficit and long term fiscal situation was their problem. But it wasn't their problem, and Trump didn't consider it his problem, so the tax bill went through as is because no one in power was worried about the consequences.
That's one of the problems with this Shadow Presidency, they have a lot of the power but none of the accountability, and power without accountability leads to really bad decisions.
what is Daimler investing that money into? A battery factory, and a little bit goes to their network. VERY little bit.
So what? Once they build all those cars do you expect them to simply forget that their cars need somewhere to recharge? Telsa can't count on their competition being inexplicably stupid. If none of this first $12 billion isn't earmarked for charging stations then a bunch of the next $12 billion will be.
The big car companies are building electric cars and they have teams of very smart people trying to figure out their charging station strategy. They could still screw it up, but they're going to do something. And if Tesla isn't careful it could find itself on the outside looking in.
Technically, he is not. They could kick him if they really wanted too. Removing him would be the worse thing they could possibly do. Probably the business equivalent of corporate suicide. Some Republicans are already barking about how much the tech. giants Twitter, Google, and Facebook control they have over speech. Limiting a sitting republican presidents speech on their platform might be enough to push them over the edge and have congress start regulating speech on internet platform.
I don't think any of us, pro trump or anti-trump, want that bunch of baboons attempting to police what we can say online. As much as we find Trumps tweets annoying, our best bet is just to ride this out. It will be over in a few years.
Possibly, though I expect the outrage would fizzle out pretty quick as Republicans sigh in relief when they realize they don't have to defend his tweets anymore.
The other question is what it does to the platform, the risk is US Conservatives write off Twitter as a Liberal haven and it loses relevancy. But currently I think a lot of people are starting to think of Twitter as "that thing Trump says crazy things on". I'm not sure he's worth the damage he's doing to their brand.
What do you see? The fact is, that you can not go across the country using CCS, CHademo, AND Level 2. It is only Tesla that allows you to drive around most of the nation.
"most of the nation" is pretty crappy coverage when you're talking about an automobile. Most people don't want to include the location of charging stations when planning for a road trip.
All in all, unless these companies spend billions just in America, they will get nowhere.
RTFM is one thing... but RTFHL?
Mercedes-Benz, not exactly the biggest manufacturer out there, is investing $12 billion, you really think they can't build out/subsidize a charging network?
Not a great comparison, I suspect Wilde was making a point about judging art, art has no intrinsic value, it's true value is entirely subjective.
But I don't think people want Bitcoin so they can admire the blockchain, they expect an eventual payoff.
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
Because it's not useful, aside from gambling (which is a losing proposition for everyone but the bookie) speculation relies on an eventual practical payoff. Tomorrow if everyone realized that the value of cryptocurrencies was purely for speculation their value would vanish overnight. Heck, if every non-motenary use of gold vanished tomorrow it would become worthless in short order as well.
As mentioned by others the only two things crypto currencies are good at are facilitating illegal activities and taking monetary power out of failing states. But people in failing states already have access to other currencies, and if the only crypto-currency activity is illegal then governments will eventually ban the buying and selling of crypto currency, and when that happens they'll die.
The "But if Nazi Germany" argument is a deliberate rhetorical faceplant though. Quite simply, you're dealing with an impossible situation (Nazi Germany, dead for over 70 years, alive and using your software) with the benefit of that 70+ years of historical perspective.
The problem is, nobody in the time of Nazi Germany had that sort of perspective.
If they had, Hitler would have been murdered well before taking power.
Again the question specifically mentioned WWII, so well after Hitler took power. And people certainly understood he was really bad news, though they didn't know about the Holocaust yet. Either way, the premise of Hitler examples generally assume you do know about the extent of their evil.
So it remains a pointless, facile argument.
And I also I specifically mentioned ISIS for just that reason because they're modern and we know they're just as evil as Hitler was (though they are a far smaller threat).
I'm sorry, but I don't think you've raised a single point that wasn't a misunderstanding on your part or something I already explained but you ignored. I feel like you just really want to make these counterarguments, and the specific content of my posts was irrelevant.
As for ISIS, it again comes down to ability to enforce. How does one tell ISIS "no no no", when you don't have the ability to force them?
Again... Do I need to restate points I made in my first comment you responded to so you don't act like it's some big shortcoming I hadn't thought of when you respond to my second comment?
The response wasn't about modern day white supremacists or neo-Nazis, it was about about actual WWII Nazis. There are people who believe you should follow a moral philosophy even if it leads to an abhorrent outcome. For instance, Kant believed you should always tell the truth even a would-be murderer was asking you for the location of your friend. In modern times this has often been adapted to telling Nazis the location of hiding Jews.
My point is that you shouldn't follow your morals off a cliff. Yes you should keep politics out of your project, but if NAZI Germany, or modern day ISIS, is suddenly using your project to do great harm then you're more than free to try and stop them.
Eric Raymond had called the decision "destructive of one of the deep norms that keeps the open source community functional -- keeping politics separated from our work."
Should politics be separated from our work? I'm not convinced it should be. The whole idea of open source / free software is political in nature as it is a means to keep power and control of a users computing with them and not in the hands of any outside entity such as a corporation or government.
I think it's a good idea to keep them separated. The problem with your movement or organization taking a political stance is partisans start fighting back. Just look what's happened to science, AGW has big political implications and the moment it was embraced by "one side" the other side basically became an anti-science political movement. If Open Source gets rebranded as a left wing political philosophy you're going to start seeing legislation targeted at stopping those Libera^H^H^H Open Source people from writing code that controls important infrastructure.
The other big issue is that the Open Source community doesn't necessarily agree on politics outside of the idea of Open Source, and the Open Source community by it's nature tends to take political philosophy a bit more seriously than most. So branding community as a left-wing thing could really split the community. And you don't really want to get into discussions on whether to ban ICE while allowing the Chinese government.
So let's take this to the extreme: If computing and Linux were around in WW2, should we have let Hitler use Linux? What if Hitler's use of Linux was the deciding factor in NAZI Germany winning the war?
Ignoring the question of how you could stop him from using Linux...
Yes. I'm willing to sacrifice many of my principles to fight NAZIs.
The reason they show up after the fact is that there are so few of them, armed good guys, that is, and they have to come from a distance, usually, since the scene of the mass shooting is almost always a "gun free zones" where good guys don't bring their guns, only bad guys have guns in gun free zones. The shooting of congressperson Gabby Giffords is one of the very few recent mass shootings that wasn't in a gun free zone, and then there still wasn't anyone there except the shooter that had a gun, still because of all the gun control laws and the failed idea that it's a good thing not to carry a gun. Its not. People who are capable to carry a gun should carry a gun, to protect themselves and others. It should be a civic duty for people to carry a gun to prevent these mass shootings if nothing else.
There never going to be that many "armed good guys", you can remove every gun reg out there and armed carriers will still be a tiny minority of the population.
And mass shooting are still incredibly rare events, the number of additional guns you'd need to achieve the necessary "armed good guy" density is going to lead to a huge number of fatalities in new shootings. We still don't know the motive here, but there's a possibility that the shooter originally bought his gun with the expectation that he'd be a good guy with a gun. People sometimes lose control.
In hollywood, a public image is an asset. Once someone is a 'star', they will be protected from consequences of their actions as the owners of the image have something to lose.
Put bluntly, the owners of the 'Michael Jackson' image are now much richer. No more baby rapeing, cutting into their PR budgets.
Think how much money was spent keeping Kevin Spacey employable.
The 'talent' is, if anything, less stable (just being winners of a lottery of sorts), but their handlers are in force and the press is owned.
That's certainly a factor, but I think Hollywood does have filtering to keep to the truly crazy people out, if for no other reason than there is a bit more organization, a few more relationships you need to maintain, and the really unstable people can't handle that.
Yep, as soon as we're all armed to the teeth, there will be a new rule: the perp gets to turn one, maybe two, into stiffs before we get a chance to whip out our weapons and open fire on the perp...miraculously missing any innocent by-standers, and there will be no chance law enforcement will see any of the citizenry waving guns around as a threat and shoot their asses for good measure.
In fact, we'll put in a new Amendment to the Constitution: we all get to whack 1 or 2 people before any serious prison time or the death penalty will result. The Law of the Jungle!!! Kill or be killed. Kill'em all, let G-d sort out the righteously armed from the armed perps. Oh, and no alcohol allowed anymore...ermm...it doesn't go well with guns. And no school children either, they don't go well with guns as well.
I think the problem with the rambo fantasy is even worse than that.
What they don't account for is the actual confusion that's going on, if you listen to the audio from the live stream one of the guys who gets shot (it sounds like he survived) asks "what did he shoot me with?"
Just think about that, the mass shooting is already underway, he's literally been shot, and he's still trying to figure out what's going on. We don't know the exact timeline of this shooting but I'm guessing that by the time most people really reacted to the situation it was already over.
That's the thing people don't quite grasp, a mass shooting is a very usual event, and the only person who's really prepared for it is the shooter themselves. You need to not only realize you're in an actual mass shooting and haven't wandered into a movie set or some kind of prank, but you need to find the shooter (if they're not standing right in front of you) and decide to kill them. Not to mention the fact if the situation is on-going you'll literally have to engage in a gunfight with someone who will likely shoot back and has just had some very relevant training in shooting people.
That's why the "good guys with guns" typically only show up after the fact, it's just not realistic to expect them to evaluate the situation quickly enough to react while it's happening.
However, I didn't make the comment since this was only a single incident... until you reminded me that this is the second such incident of a mentally unstable Youtuber going on a murder suicide when they lost their income stream.
Seems to happen with some regularity in Hollywood that someone famous ODs when faced with the prospect of diminishing opportunities to earn the revenue stream they've become accustomed to.
It's probably really difficult for these types of people to accept working a "regular" job for a pittance, in much the same way I'd imagine most of us would lose our shit if we were faced with the possibility of swapping lives with a Chinese factory worker.
Realistically speaking, this guy was never likely to find something else which paid the amount of money he was making. That said, it still doesn't excuse the murderous part of his suicide.
I'd agree Hollywood has partially the same issue though I don't think the problem is quite as extreme, in Hollywood the talent tends to be a bit more stable and the downfall tends to be a bit slower and softer.
I'm reminded of the woman who likewise killed herself and tried to kill others, when she was likewise effectively fired from her job making Youtube videos without appeal or recourse. She didn't even get an explanation, I don't know if that's the case for this guy.
The "gig economy" involves monopolistic control for the gatekeepers, and zero rights for employees. We can probably expect more of this, barring some regulatory effort.
My first instinct on this story was to make some comment on how crazy was one way to make popular Youtube videos, and combining crazy with an income stream that might be taken away at any moment is a recipe for trouble.
However, I didn't make the comment since this was only a single incident... until you reminded me that this is the second such incident of a mentally unstable Youtuber going on a murder suicide when they lost their income stream.
I fear this isn't going to be the last incident, Youtube is going to get more and more unstable people pushing the boundaries of what's allowed, and when they (or in this case Valve) start enforcing those boundaries you're going to keep getting unstable people with a very big grievance against you.
Slashdot Mirror
Weatherbug was pretty careful not to make the leap that Florence is a result of climate change. They had an article speculating that the reason Florence became so strong is the result of a Bermuda high which is in an unusual position for the year. The article's author felts that the blocking high was keeping Florence over warmer water so it could strengthen. Typically September hurricanes turn back out to sea.
Think of a coin that's kinda weird aerodynamically so when you flip it it will land heads 70% of the time.
Then you flip the coin 10 times and it lands heads 8 times. That's unlikely with an unbiased coin, but not impossible.
So do you say the bias caused it to land heads 8/10? Do you say it contributed? Do you say we can't really comment at all?
That's the basic discussion climate scientists are having right now.
Screw that! It's not a college dorm room. It's a prison!
"Oh, but their rights"...screw that too! Make prisons a place YOU DO NOT want to be,
more like the 60's movie "Cool Hand Luke" and maybe they will think twice about breaking
the law!
Do you want them to re-offend when they get out or become productive law-abiding citizens? Then treat them fairly, harshly if need be, but fairly. That teaches them that being a productive member of a functioning society pays off.
But being arbitrary and capricious just tells them that the rules don't matter, only power. So when they get out they'll go back to breaking the law because you've failed to show them why the law is just.
The trick is actually just to take up challenges, lead yourself.
This is one of the big lessons I learned going from school to the work force.
In school the assignments always have a solution, the teacher always knows it, and they have a pretty good idea of the best path for you to get there.
In industry, good managers have an idea... but if the task were already solved then there wouldn't be anything for you to do. So if you're assuming the path as laid out will invariably lead to success you're eventually going to hit a brick wall. I've seen this a number of time with co-op students, they really struggle when a minor redesign comes up and changes some characteristic of the task they've been assigned. It's not so much the lack of experience, but they can't quite accept that their assignment as given was flawed.
I've found two things that really help me. First, when I'm confused I start asking questions until things make sense. Sometimes I'm confused because I don't understand the area (and I would have screwed up if I didn't ask questions). But other times the project plan had some serious issue, and asking questions eventually exposed that issue and saved the company some serious money*.
The other thing I've found is a lot of good features and ideas tend to get ignored, and pushing for those features to get implemented (or even doing them on your own if appropriate) can bring a lot of value. As a bonus those tasks tend to be the things you're better at, and you're building a little domain of your expertise into the project.
* In one unfortunate experience I had with a technical manager was on a project involving some functionality I hadn't been exposed to. I didn't have a clear grasp of the concepts so I asked the manager to explain some points and he basically replied "You've been here X years! I don't understand how you don't know this already?" And so I accordingly shut up with my questions.
After a week and a half of several people working on the project another technical manager came back from vacation and started asked me to explain the design, I got to the part that confused me and I explained that it handled it by the functionality working like X, he replied, no, the functionality works like Y, at which point we both realized the project was fatally flawed.
Next day that project was abandoned.
My personal estimation is that we have about 20% people that know what they are doing, at least in IT. (Yes, I know that impostor syndrome refers to people that have external evidence that they are actually competent. But in IT holding a specific position does realistically not provide that evidence, even if a psychologist may believe it does.)
It depends a lot on the organization, but are ~20% of people proper experts with the technology or product they're working on? Probably. That means a good chunk of the remaining 80% keep on running into the boundaries of their knowledge, thinking "hmm, I probably should know this, I bet Bob and Sally know it, it's important for me to perform this task, but it's kinda vague".
Now a lot of them are probably still providing good value, and Bob and Sally might not know after all, but that continual experience sounds like a good recipe for imposter syndrome.
The other aspect is productivity, if I were working 100% engaged for 8 hours a day my productivity would be at least doubled, but I just can't mange that. I kind of assume other people manage it, but they're probably hiding their distractions and lack of engagement the same as I am.
IMHO anybody who sues over stock manipulation should have no net position (outside of a truly blind trust) in the stocks or other financial instruments whose performance might be affected by news of the suit and/or its progress.
If you think they're jacking up the price through misrepresentation you should have sold already since the stock is overvalued so your pointless.
If you believe the CEO is deliberately tanking the stock price you're asking the plaintiff to take a major loss since they're selling the stock for far less than it's worth so your policy is forcing the plaintiff to take a big loss just to file the suit.
I recognize the conflict of interest... but I don't think your policy is a good idea.
Watch the stock sink even quicker for Telsa and go bust by the end of this year?
Or watch the stock dive 'way down, watch Elon buy much of it up with the money he's already cashed out, and end up with a LOT less of the company owned by others.
Is he crazy like The Mad Hatter, or like a fox?
1. Cash out when the price is high.
2. Start acting erratically and tank the value of the stock.
3. Buy back in at the much lower price.
4. Go to prison because that sounds REALLY sketchy and probably illegal.
... And there's still a ridiculous amount of derangement.
Definitely.
Hilldog was a bad candidate who few outside the far left liked.
Hilldog?
She was a crappy candidate in the sense she sucked at campaigning. But her base wasn't the far left, it was policy wonks.
She was caught meddling in her own party's process to boot Bernie. She tried pretending that destroying evidence on her personal email server was an innocent mistake.
The private server was a screw up the violated department regs, but that's all.
And for deleting emails she did exactly what she was supposed to do according to regs, turn over the emails her team deemed work related and then securely delete the server.
The screw up was the IT guy not deleting when the original request was given, but instead deleting when the subpoena came in and he realized "oh crap! I was supposed to delete those months ago!". But there's no evidence that anyone buy the IT guy made that decision (and he got immunity, so he certainly had reason to talk).
Now 2 years later, uncountable hours have gone into trying to shift the blame. When will the Dems admit it was a mistake to have her as the candidate?
Yeah, she was below average as a candidate, to the extent the party encouraged the field to clear out to smooth her nomination it was a major mistake.
But 2 years later you're still whining about Hillary's deficiencies as some sort of excuse for electing the most absurdly awful candidate in history. The rest of the planet is still baffled as to what the hell your country was thinking, Trump as President is barely believable in a script for a slapstick comedy.
Fair Question: Did Clinton meddle in the Russian election?
There are two broad categories of states, functioning Democracies where the leaders can be booted out by the public, and countries where you're going to need a revolution to change leadership.
I'm actually fine with a policy where you should leave the functioning Democracies as is but you're free to screw around with the other countries to make them functioning Democracies since the common thread is you're trying to make the leadership of those countries accountable to the people.
Therefore I'll happily condemn Russian meddling in US elections but encourage US meddling in the Russian theatre productions they call elections. The US meddling in Ukraine is a bit more ambiguous, they were a semi-functioning Democracy but with a leader trying very hard to entrench himself for life. The Ukrainian revolution actually made them a lot closer to a functioning Democracy, which as it turns out was a great motive for Russia to invade them and steal some territory.
And what were the consequences of the tax bill other than a huge economic upshot in the last few months? You may not like a particular policy but there is more at stake than simply giving "rich people a break".
The stock market is doing well because the stock market is based on corporate earnings and corporations just got a massive tax. The economy seems to just be holding steady from Obama, but that might be an illusion since wages have stagnated and some of the recent manufacturing boom is just companies stocking up on supplies before a trade war.
Even if it did cause some economic growth you still need to pay off your bills and not cause a massive hole in the deficit, this is the exact lesson we learned with the Bush tax cuts. You don't get rich by going on a shopping spree.
Per Bernie Sanders and others on the left, rich people and corporations don't pay taxes, so the logical conclusion is that you can't increase or decrease their tax load because they have none.
I don't know if this is supposed to be a joke, hyperbole, or just a really confused statement.
There's a bit of that. But you can't just invoke the 25th when a big portion of the country thinks the leader is doing awesome and the Deep State is planning a coup, it's a recipe for some serious civil unrest (and an even more extreme nominee next time around).
I think the author is trying to build the public case that Trump is unfit. This can help for the 25th, impeachment, the next election, giving congress political cover to pass veto-proof bills to keep Trump in check, or even just forcing a responsible nomination when Sessions get's fired (ie, if the adults in the room are the only ones protecting the country don't let him fire them and staff it with children).
Honestly the most disconcerting thing about this is that the author cites some of the worst things this administration has done as their few "successes" and says they were accomplished despite, not because of, Trump. I think Trump is an amoral buffoon and a disgrace to the nation as much as the author seems to, but I'm honestly a little glad to hear that that buffoon is gumming up the plans of those who want to rape and pillage our country for their own profit, instead of Darth Pence streamlining that process.
That might be only half true, I think a lot of politics is people coming in saying "I want to do X, Y, and Z!" and then they're confronted with all the potential consequences to they end up saying, "Fine, I'll only do x and y". That was one of the big complaints with Obama, where a lot of his policies fell short of his rhetoric. But I thought that was just a consequence of a responsible leader moderating their ideas.
In the US I think the President is the one who's supposed to play that role, they're the one with the legacy and they're the one who's supposed to be responsible for the entire country, not just a particular region or base. But Trump doesn't really care about that other stuff, so when someone comes up saying "I want to do X!" he lets them do "X!" without thinking about the consequences.
For instance, on the tax bill I think a lot of GOP types really wanted to do a big massive corporate tax cut, both for ideological reasons but also to pay back their donors, and they went into the room trying to write a massive tax cut.
A President worried about their legacy and feeling personally accountable for the country's long term welfare probably would have pushed for a more moderate bill, even a President Rubio or Ryan would probably have made a more moderate bill if they were the President and their deficit and long term fiscal situation was their problem. But it wasn't their problem, and Trump didn't consider it his problem, so the tax bill went through as is because no one in power was worried about the consequences.
That's one of the problems with this Shadow Presidency, they have a lot of the power but none of the accountability, and power without accountability leads to really bad decisions.
what is Daimler investing that money into? A battery factory, and a little bit goes to their network. VERY little bit.
So what? Once they build all those cars do you expect them to simply forget that their cars need somewhere to recharge? Telsa can't count on their competition being inexplicably stupid. If none of this first $12 billion isn't earmarked for charging stations then a bunch of the next $12 billion will be.
The big car companies are building electric cars and they have teams of very smart people trying to figure out their charging station strategy. They could still screw it up, but they're going to do something. And if Tesla isn't careful it could find itself on the outside looking in.
Technically, he is not. They could kick him if they really wanted too. Removing him would be the worse thing they could possibly do. Probably the business equivalent of corporate suicide. Some Republicans are already barking about how much the tech. giants Twitter, Google, and Facebook control they have over speech. Limiting a sitting republican presidents speech on their platform might be enough to push them over the edge and have congress start regulating speech on internet platform.
I don't think any of us, pro trump or anti-trump, want that bunch of baboons attempting to police what we can say online. As much as we find Trumps tweets annoying, our best bet is just to ride this out. It will be over in a few years.
Possibly, though I expect the outrage would fizzle out pretty quick as Republicans sigh in relief when they realize they don't have to defend his tweets anymore.
The other question is what it does to the platform, the risk is US Conservatives write off Twitter as a Liberal haven and it loses relevancy. But currently I think a lot of people are starting to think of Twitter as "that thing Trump says crazy things on". I'm not sure he's worth the damage he's doing to their brand.
What do you see? The fact is, that you can not go across the country using CCS, CHademo, AND Level 2.
It is only Tesla that allows you to drive around most of the nation.
"most of the nation" is pretty crappy coverage when you're talking about an automobile. Most people don't want to include the location of charging stations when planning for a road trip.
All in all, unless these companies spend billions just in America, they will get nowhere.
RTFM is one thing... but RTFHL?
Mercedes-Benz, not exactly the biggest manufacturer out there, is investing $12 billion, you really think they can't build out/subsidize a charging network?
If they use Telsa's supercharger network that's great news for Tesla.
But if they and other manufacturers decide to share their own standard for charging stations (open or otherwise) then Tesla might be in major trouble.
"All art is quite useless." - Oscar Wilde
Not a great comparison, I suspect Wilde was making a point about judging art, art has no intrinsic value, it's true value is entirely subjective.
But I don't think people want Bitcoin so they can admire the blockchain, they expect an eventual payoff.
It's not their best headline writing, but TFA makes the point clear: cryptocurrencies are not currencies, let alone useful currencies. Their only "use" is speculation, and to an economist, that doesn't count as "useful".
Because it's not useful, aside from gambling (which is a losing proposition for everyone but the bookie) speculation relies on an eventual practical payoff. Tomorrow if everyone realized that the value of cryptocurrencies was purely for speculation their value would vanish overnight. Heck, if every non-motenary use of gold vanished tomorrow it would become worthless in short order as well.
As mentioned by others the only two things crypto currencies are good at are facilitating illegal activities and taking monetary power out of failing states. But people in failing states already have access to other currencies, and if the only crypto-currency activity is illegal then governments will eventually ban the buying and selling of crypto currency, and when that happens they'll die.
The "But if Nazi Germany" argument is a deliberate rhetorical faceplant though.
Quite simply, you're dealing with an impossible situation (Nazi Germany, dead for over 70 years, alive and using your software) with the benefit of that 70+ years of historical perspective.
The problem is, nobody in the time of Nazi Germany had that sort of perspective.
If they had, Hitler would have been murdered well before taking power.
Again the question specifically mentioned WWII, so well after Hitler took power. And people certainly understood he was really bad news, though they didn't know about the Holocaust yet. Either way, the premise of Hitler examples generally assume you do know about the extent of their evil.
So it remains a pointless, facile argument.
And I also I specifically mentioned ISIS for just that reason because they're modern and we know they're just as evil as Hitler was (though they are a far smaller threat).
I'm sorry, but I don't think you've raised a single point that wasn't a misunderstanding on your part or something I already explained but you ignored. I feel like you just really want to make these counterarguments, and the specific content of my posts was irrelevant.
As for ISIS, it again comes down to ability to enforce.
How does one tell ISIS "no no no", when you don't have the ability to force them?
Again... Do I need to restate points I made in my first comment you responded to so you don't act like it's some big shortcoming I hadn't thought of when you respond to my second comment?
Ignoring the question of how you could stop him from using Linux...
Yes. I'm willing to sacrifice many of my principles to fight NAZIs.
Now onto the real problem.
*Parades 1000 random people in front of you*
Now. Pick out the "nazi".
This one.
The response wasn't about modern day white supremacists or neo-Nazis, it was about about actual WWII Nazis. There are people who believe you should follow a moral philosophy even if it leads to an abhorrent outcome. For instance, Kant believed you should always tell the truth even a would-be murderer was asking you for the location of your friend. In modern times this has often been adapted to telling Nazis the location of hiding Jews.
My point is that you shouldn't follow your morals off a cliff. Yes you should keep politics out of your project, but if NAZI Germany, or modern day ISIS, is suddenly using your project to do great harm then you're more than free to try and stop them.
Should politics be separated from our work? I'm not convinced it should be. The whole idea of open source / free software is political in nature as it is a means to keep power and control of a users computing with them and not in the hands of any outside entity such as a corporation or government.
I think it's a good idea to keep them separated. The problem with your movement or organization taking a political stance is partisans start fighting back. Just look what's happened to science, AGW has big political implications and the moment it was embraced by "one side" the other side basically became an anti-science political movement. If Open Source gets rebranded as a left wing political philosophy you're going to start seeing legislation targeted at stopping those Libera^H^H^H Open Source people from writing code that controls important infrastructure.
The other big issue is that the Open Source community doesn't necessarily agree on politics outside of the idea of Open Source, and the Open Source community by it's nature tends to take political philosophy a bit more seriously than most. So branding community as a left-wing thing could really split the community. And you don't really want to get into discussions on whether to ban ICE while allowing the Chinese government.
So let's take this to the extreme: If computing and Linux were around in WW2, should we have let Hitler use Linux? What if Hitler's use of Linux was the deciding factor in NAZI Germany winning the war?
Ignoring the question of how you could stop him from using Linux...
Yes. I'm willing to sacrifice many of my principles to fight NAZIs.
It'll take centuries to clean it all up!
There's only one solution to this!
We need to declare a War on Wind!!
The reason they show up after the fact is that there are so few of them, armed good guys, that is, and they have to come from a distance, usually, since the scene of the mass shooting is almost always a "gun free zones" where good guys don't bring their guns, only bad guys have guns in gun free zones. The shooting of congressperson Gabby Giffords is one of the very few recent mass shootings that wasn't in a gun free zone, and then there still wasn't anyone there except the shooter that had a gun, still because of all the gun control laws and the failed idea that it's a good thing not to carry a gun. Its not. People who are capable to carry a gun should carry a gun, to protect themselves and others. It should be a civic duty for people to carry a gun to prevent these mass shootings if nothing else.
There never going to be that many "armed good guys", you can remove every gun reg out there and armed carriers will still be a tiny minority of the population.
And mass shooting are still incredibly rare events, the number of additional guns you'd need to achieve the necessary "armed good guy" density is going to lead to a huge number of fatalities in new shootings. We still don't know the motive here, but there's a possibility that the shooter originally bought his gun with the expectation that he'd be a good guy with a gun. People sometimes lose control.
In hollywood, a public image is an asset. Once someone is a 'star', they will be protected from consequences of their actions as the owners of the image have something to lose.
Put bluntly, the owners of the 'Michael Jackson' image are now much richer. No more baby rapeing, cutting into their PR budgets.
Think how much money was spent keeping Kevin Spacey employable.
The 'talent' is, if anything, less stable (just being winners of a lottery of sorts), but their handlers are in force and the press is owned.
That's certainly a factor, but I think Hollywood does have filtering to keep to the truly crazy people out, if for no other reason than there is a bit more organization, a few more relationships you need to maintain, and the really unstable people can't handle that.
Yep, as soon as we're all armed to the teeth, there will be a new rule: the perp gets to turn one, maybe two, into stiffs before we get a chance to whip out our weapons and open fire on the perp...miraculously missing any innocent by-standers, and there will be no chance law enforcement will see any of the citizenry waving guns around as a threat and shoot their asses for good measure.
In fact, we'll put in a new Amendment to the Constitution: we all get to whack 1 or 2 people before any serious prison time or the death penalty will result. The Law of the Jungle!!! Kill or be killed. Kill'em all, let G-d sort out the righteously armed from the armed perps. Oh, and no alcohol allowed anymore...ermm...it doesn't go well with guns. And no school children either, they don't go well with guns as well.
I think the problem with the rambo fantasy is even worse than that.
What they don't account for is the actual confusion that's going on, if you listen to the audio from the live stream one of the guys who gets shot (it sounds like he survived) asks "what did he shoot me with?"
Just think about that, the mass shooting is already underway, he's literally been shot, and he's still trying to figure out what's going on. We don't know the exact timeline of this shooting but I'm guessing that by the time most people really reacted to the situation it was already over.
That's the thing people don't quite grasp, a mass shooting is a very usual event, and the only person who's really prepared for it is the shooter themselves. You need to not only realize you're in an actual mass shooting and haven't wandered into a movie set or some kind of prank, but you need to find the shooter (if they're not standing right in front of you) and decide to kill them. Not to mention the fact if the situation is on-going you'll literally have to engage in a gunfight with someone who will likely shoot back and has just had some very relevant training in shooting people.
That's why the "good guys with guns" typically only show up after the fact, it's just not realistic to expect them to evaluate the situation quickly enough to react while it's happening.
However, I didn't make the comment since this was only a single incident... until you reminded me that this is the second such incident of a mentally unstable Youtuber going on a murder suicide when they lost their income stream.
Seems to happen with some regularity in Hollywood that someone famous ODs when faced with the prospect of diminishing opportunities to earn the revenue stream they've become accustomed to.
It's probably really difficult for these types of people to accept working a "regular" job for a pittance, in much the same way I'd imagine most of us would lose our shit if we were faced with the possibility of swapping lives with a Chinese factory worker.
Realistically speaking, this guy was never likely to find something else which paid the amount of money he was making. That said, it still doesn't excuse the murderous part of his suicide.
I'd agree Hollywood has partially the same issue though I don't think the problem is quite as extreme, in Hollywood the talent tends to be a bit more stable and the downfall tends to be a bit slower and softer.
I'm reminded of the woman who likewise killed herself and tried to kill others, when she was likewise effectively fired from her job making Youtube videos without appeal or recourse. She didn't even get an explanation, I don't know if that's the case for this guy.
The "gig economy" involves monopolistic control for the gatekeepers, and zero rights for employees. We can probably expect more of this, barring some regulatory effort.
My first instinct on this story was to make some comment on how crazy was one way to make popular Youtube videos, and combining crazy with an income stream that might be taken away at any moment is a recipe for trouble.
However, I didn't make the comment since this was only a single incident... until you reminded me that this is the second such incident of a mentally unstable Youtuber going on a murder suicide when they lost their income stream.
I fear this isn't going to be the last incident, Youtube is going to get more and more unstable people pushing the boundaries of what's allowed, and when they (or in this case Valve) start enforcing those boundaries you're going to keep getting unstable people with a very big grievance against you.