While on the surface the decision seems benign and unbiased, it is very hard to do anything that is not.
Basically at least in Canada the way demographics and voters go, is the further left of center you are, the younger you probably are, and the more likely you use social media like Facebook. So the use of Facebook in any way is going to disproportionately impact some political parties over others. The current Liberal government is centrist left. So one might argue this is simply a political ploy to improve their chances during the next election against their really only rival which are the less centrist right Conservative party. Now I am sure all this is done under the auspices of the Ministry that does the elections which is supposed to be bipartisan, but I'm not sure the Conservatives will feel/spin it that way.
I also figure because they are slow, they be used as an "elevated" level of threat to alter opposing action.
i.e. The bombers are in the air, they will reach you in X hours. Stop what you are doing immediately or face the consequences. As mentioned previously, unlike other options, bombers can be called back/off pretty last minute, whereas other launches once the decision has been made, and the button pressed, it is too late for second thoughts.
Anyway too many people are thinking in terms of tactically using these weapons, and while some do exist in that function, their primary purpose is as a threat, and that threat being destruction of a country by way of population centers. They have been only used in one war, and arguably even then only to save lives. If I recall correctly it was only after estimates came back for a land based invasion plan that put the allied casualties at over 1 million, and likely civilian casualties in the many millions, so at the time was seen as a "reasonable" course of action if you can call it that.
I tried out the beta of Battlefront 2 and while I was hopeful and excited, and it was fun for a bit, I soured on it pretty quickly.
As you mentioned, the trend to micopay the crap out of every new game and suck every dime of profit they can siphon from a release is brutal. I refuse to keep paying to play a game I've already bought.
Luigi: "Hey, it'd be a real shame if something were to happen to your game there. Might be some of your opponents will all get perks that will make them destroy you every game. That would be a real shame I says. You could pay me a small "fee" even now and again and we can protect you from that happening, if you take my meaning..."
Second, which isn't EA's fault, but rather the industry as a whole, is the dumbing down of what could have been a really GREAT game because of cross development for consoles and their limited use of controllers. Specifically talking about the starfighter multiplayer mode. I remember with great nostalgia the old Xwing VS Tie fighter, and have been waiting for nigh 20 years for something to come along and basically give me the exact same thing, but with updated graphics etc... But no, we get this thing which basically has 3 buttons of functionality.
Heck if you took the old LucusArts Dark Knight 2 and mashed it together with Xwing VS Tie fighter, you would get a better product (not not visually) than what Battlefront 2 is right now. Sad.
In part. However I think it is just as much the fault of changing trends forcing chip makers to refocus priorities.
With a PC, you could make your CPU run as fast as you want, just pump more power into it. It was coming from the wall so who cares. So long as you can somehow cool you cpu down enough to keep it from melting you're fine...
Enter the age of the laptop. Now you have a battery. Any performance gain in cpu driven by power is going to reduce your battery duration. All the focus and development in the last decade hasn't been to increase raw cpu power but rather to make small gains while trying to making them as power efficient as possible. Indeed as many have mention the demand isn't as much any more as software hasn't really required it, and those that do are usually more gpu dependent than not. At the same time software has struggled to really take advantage of the 64bit architecture that has been around for years, nor even parallel processing with multiple cpu's that have been around for some time now. At most, there is more memory available generally, and you can multitask programs, but that is mostly it. Very few applications really take advantage of either really, and even then how many things do you really need to do at the same time we these 8, 12, 16 core systems?
Anyway I'll probably build a new system in the next year or so anyway, though I may not really actually *need* to... Then again I could probably get away with just buying a new gpu really...
So by that argument the message being sent is to try to avoid over-performing and getting raises as that will eventually get you fired once you are paid too much. Workers should strive for mediocrity and never perform more than they have to in order to avoid getting pay raises and eventual termination... Slow and steady wins the race I guess...
As soon as I saw the headline the other day the first thing that came to mind is that they are cleaning house of all the union seekers, perhaps lumping them in with a bunch of others to hide the fact. However this will probably end up polarizing workers to unionize rather than to drive it out I would think as a result.
Don't have a lot of Agile experience, managers seem to love the "latest" (it isn't all that new) buzzword. I've found a lot of the principles are done anyway with a good back and forth relationship with the developers. However... I've noticed that doing rapid Agile type development exacerbates some of the existing challenges in testing, namely regression testing. Basically you have to be testing ALL the time. I'd have to block off essentially all my time for testing, whereas in less iterative approaches, you test for a specific release, go do other stuff you have to do for your job, then when the time comes, do some more testing on a release.
One of the PITA of testing that everyone will understand is regression testing where whatever it is that is being worked on, breaks something else, many times with no seeming connect (at least at the time). Anyway with more discrete releases I think it is easier to nail this down. However when there are constantly releases, of which any of them could break anything else, you just end up testing ad infinitum for the duration of the project. Which is fine if you have one project you work on. If you have a dozen projects all on the go, it becomes untenable. So I guess it is more of a resources issue that management might not understand. Also some of those principles of Agile basically box up failures into critical or not, which one would do normally anyway, but again due to the numbers involved, some of those non-critical can snowball into major issues, to which at that point it's too late. There seems to be a lot of, well with Agile, you just got to live with mistakes and move on and do more Agile, etc... Doesn't make for a very stable release ever.
All the meetings are supposed to facilitate better communication that is needed in such short intervals/iterations, however I've found wasted time where you're testing a function in the test environment, only to find out later you wasted your afternoon because the developers had already fixed it in the development environment, but it wasn't ready for deployment yet, etc...
Anyway not supposed to be a condemnation of Agile, but it has its issues, and is certainly not infallible or the fix that management might think it is. A flexible waterfall is just as good if not better in many situations. I don't know too many that do a strict waterfall anyway in reality, which is indeed somewhat cumbersome. Agile is the other end of the spectrum and at least in my opinion, just as cumbersome as it's opposite. I think much of these methodologies are a way for management to try to idiot proof or reduce the amount of skill required for any particular project. However reality is, if you get good developers, and good project management, business engagement and documentation, and testers that know what it is they are looking at you will always have better outcomes than less skilled, but following a strict methodology. Bottom line from a management perspective and project costs, methodology is free, and skill costs. However at the end of the day when looking at TCO it might not be, but then again, that might be another project and another manager, call it a success, put it on your resume "AGILE" and move on...
I'd also imagine it is a bit of a work in process, as the more times they reuse a single rocket, that extra inspection time is probably used to see which components fail first, how they might be redesigned to either last longer, be replaced easier and/or cheaper, etc... After every launch and inspection they likely refine what might be put into the next generation, then rise and repeat until a threshold of diminishing returns is hit barring technical innovation in regards to some bob or bit or material.
Faisil: [in a conference room in their counter terrorism sector] They call him the Sand Spider. Spencer Trilby: Why? Faisil: Probably because it sounds scary.
The way I see it they can justify it because of the Market. The Market being that everyone and his uncle are creating their own shitter streaming services, and charging about the same money for it. So they can basically point to a whole bunch of worse services charging about the same money and can they justify raising their price slight able because relatively speaking it is "worth" it. As I said I don't think this is anything that they have done, but rather their crappy competitors.
This was basically the criticism about Janeway. Not so much that she was a women, but rather that they overcompensated a great deal. She was Captain and expert in everything... Not sure why they even bothered with the rest of the crew other than to have people for her to talk with as she seemingly just did everything by her self. All other Star Trek crews had clear delineation of expertise and they would work as a team to solve whatever solution was needed... Heck in STTNG they even split off Kirk's 3 primary skills, 1) Command, Picard obviously, 2) Gorn destroying double axe handle fighting technique, Worf, and 3) The ability to slut around with alien lifeforms, Riker. This seems more of the same as Janeway the one woman wreaking machine other than she was *supposed* to be a Captain, but due to her trying to save everyone by herself (sound familiar), now has no rank.
Also I'll raise a Vulcan eyebrow at the addition of interstellar telepathy to the repertoire of her apparent skills... Though her neck pinch skills must suck if her former Captain simply woke up after a couple minutes.
What makes it worse, is that it happened in Canada on the Space Channel... There is no ^#%@ football on the space channel wtf! (Unless space football is created at some point, at which time I would definitely start watching it!)
I get it was delayed on CBS, but they really had to delay it in Canada as well?
Consoles only have two advantages really, and even then not even that is secure.
#1 Consoles have the ability to be plugged into your TV, and use controllers. The whole controller VS keyboard/mouse argument aside it is nice to be able to sit my ass on a couch for hours at a time to play Skyrim or whatever. That said, there is absolutely nothing stopping people with a PC from hooking it up to their TV and buying a controller if they really want to now. Only difference is one take a small bit of configuring while the other is automatic.
#2 Cost. A console is a lot cheaper than a PC. Though one could argue that the specs on those consoles make it an unfair comparison to a fully fledged gaming PC. However it is still a bit less expensive than a cheapo PC gaming rig. That said, years ago I had my Xbox360 and all my games stolen. I had to make a list for the insurance company. The problem with the above argument is that console makers have inflated their game prices a lot over the years. At 75$ plus tax per game it adds up. I think I got nearly 2000$ and a very large chunk of that was console games. How much was that PC gaming rig that you play DOTA2 on for free again....? So yeah I don't think the ToC is as disparate as it is made out to be.
[as the Federation ships prepare to fire on the dark planet] Scientist's Aide: Its structure has just solidified on the surface. Head Scientist: I think it's anticipating the attack. Anticipation denotes intelligence. Priest Vito Cornelius: The most terrible intelligence imaginable, Mr. President.
I'll add two similar comments. The first is that your first statement is completely correct. In first hand experience I was in a temporary position for some time, it finally came up for permanent, and I competed for it. After it was all said and done the cancelled the entire thing. When brought in by several managers to tell me the fun news, I noted that there had been other positions that had been posted after, and successfully filled within that time. I was told the reason point blank that my position was not part of "core business". I was flabbergasted. I mentioned to them if the systems I manage go down or have issues, none of those "core business" people are doing any work whatsoever. I received a bunch of blank stares and that is about it. It was only through a later reorg I got out of that area and onto better things where I appear to be more valued.
Secondly, which is really a combo of the two points, in many cases, your value is only in terms of a current or particular project. No one wants to keep staff on, they just want things done and move on. Which means you get short term tenure, a revolving door of IT. I wouldn't be surprised in the case of Equifax that the security setup and the rest was all done by either external consultants, or by folks brought on for that particular "project" all of who have since moved on. They probably indicated that a system like that needs to be constantly maintained and monitored, and management said "yea sure", and handed it off to the handful of overworked general IT boffins they use to do everything. It could be that patching the security vulnerability was on their "to do" list but when your work is basically an ever expanding exercise in triage, and you tend to do things your immediate manager cares about (which isn't some security patch which *might* be an issue) it could be that they just didn't have the time to get around to it, a couple of months can fly by pretty quick. So yeah, you earn your breaches.
A how do you make something "binding". At this scale that's pretty hard to do. Anyone going to tank their own economy by applying economic sanctions on the US or China? Military?
I mean about the only thing is trying to not look like an asshole on the international stage. I'm not sure Trump cares all so much about that either.
"a voluntary non-binding commitment, where you set your own terms that you can then ignore" I think that pretty much describes all agreements, in particular the environmental kind.
As individual countries, everything is "voluntary". What kind of "binding commitment" is ever made that can't be broken with little or no repercussions for an individual country. Countries regularly set their own terms and then ignore them for everything. Looking back a previous examples, I don't think any of them are ever met.
Anyway not to belittle the symbolic nature of the idea, and to get countries talking about it. I'm just always astounded by the assertion that a country isn't going to do whatever it wants. This is literally what politics is. I mean if a country didn't meet targets, then what? Economic sanctions? On the US for example LOL? Again it is all politics, and to a certain point just theatrics with these sorts of things. Trump just wants to come out tough for his base, then "re-negotiate" to make himself look good, all with little or no repercussion. As mentioned, whatever it is will probably be ignored, and the time frame to which it will take place will be outside his term of office anyway...
Not to mention I think many are of the mind that the US is constantly circumventing NAFTA, and what the point of a pact if one of the members only abide by it when they feel like it. Things like the softwood lumber issue when Canada has already won in the courts, and it looks like it is going to happen all over again. The whole "Buy America" policies, etc... However this isn't a Trump thing, these are systemic issues that have been around since the start really.
Refuse the PCCA, and you come out on top with your base. "Re-negotiate", set some made up goals (like most do anyway, and on a time scale outside of your term in office), and you become the "Deal Maker"...
Basically you get to look tough, then a savvy negotiator, and "get stuff done" which you can totally lie about progress because of the time frame.
Slashdot Mirror
While on the surface the decision seems benign and unbiased, it is very hard to do anything that is not.
Basically at least in Canada the way demographics and voters go, is the further left of center you are, the younger you probably are, and the more likely you use social media like Facebook. So the use of Facebook in any way is going to disproportionately impact some political parties over others. The current Liberal government is centrist left. So one might argue this is simply a political ploy to improve their chances during the next election against their really only rival which are the less centrist right Conservative party. Now I am sure all this is done under the auspices of the Ministry that does the elections which is supposed to be bipartisan, but I'm not sure the Conservatives will feel/spin it that way.
I also figure because they are slow, they be used as an "elevated" level of threat to alter opposing action.
i.e. The bombers are in the air, they will reach you in X hours. Stop what you are doing immediately or face the consequences. As mentioned previously, unlike other options, bombers can be called back/off pretty last minute, whereas other launches once the decision has been made, and the button pressed, it is too late for second thoughts.
Anyway too many people are thinking in terms of tactically using these weapons, and while some do exist in that function, their primary purpose is as a threat, and that threat being destruction of a country by way of population centers. They have been only used in one war, and arguably even then only to save lives. If I recall correctly it was only after estimates came back for a land based invasion plan that put the allied casualties at over 1 million, and likely civilian casualties in the many millions, so at the time was seen as a "reasonable" course of action if you can call it that.
Hi I'm here for my Gastric By-pass surgery!
Loose some weight first...
What?!
OK the race is on for whichever nations can grab the best caves on the moon!
Then the cave wars begin.
Who is the Fool? The Fool, or the Fool who follows him?
Sad.
I tried out the beta of Battlefront 2 and while I was hopeful and excited, and it was fun for a bit, I soured on it pretty quickly.
As you mentioned, the trend to micopay the crap out of every new game and suck every dime of profit they can siphon from a release is brutal. I refuse to keep paying to play a game I've already bought.
Luigi: "Hey, it'd be a real shame if something were to happen to your game there. Might be some of your opponents will all get perks that will make them destroy you every game. That would be a real shame I says. You could pay me a small "fee" even now and again and we can protect you from that happening, if you take my meaning..."
Second, which isn't EA's fault, but rather the industry as a whole, is the dumbing down of what could have been a really GREAT game because of cross development for consoles and their limited use of controllers. Specifically talking about the starfighter multiplayer mode. I remember with great nostalgia the old Xwing VS Tie fighter, and have been waiting for nigh 20 years for something to come along and basically give me the exact same thing, but with updated graphics etc... But no, we get this thing which basically has 3 buttons of functionality.
Heck if you took the old LucusArts Dark Knight 2 and mashed it together with Xwing VS Tie fighter, you would get a better product (not not visually) than what Battlefront 2 is right now. Sad.
In part. However I think it is just as much the fault of changing trends forcing chip makers to refocus priorities.
With a PC, you could make your CPU run as fast as you want, just pump more power into it. It was coming from the wall so who cares. So long as you can somehow cool you cpu down enough to keep it from melting you're fine...
Enter the age of the laptop. Now you have a battery. Any performance gain in cpu driven by power is going to reduce your battery duration. All the focus and development in the last decade hasn't been to increase raw cpu power but rather to make small gains while trying to making them as power efficient as possible. Indeed as many have mention the demand isn't as much any more as software hasn't really required it, and those that do are usually more gpu dependent than not. At the same time software has struggled to really take advantage of the 64bit architecture that has been around for years, nor even parallel processing with multiple cpu's that have been around for some time now. At most, there is more memory available generally, and you can multitask programs, but that is mostly it. Very few applications really take advantage of either really, and even then how many things do you really need to do at the same time we these 8, 12, 16 core systems?
Anyway I'll probably build a new system in the next year or so anyway, though I may not really actually *need* to... Then again I could probably get away with just buying a new gpu really...
So by that argument the message being sent is to try to avoid over-performing and getting raises as that will eventually get you fired once you are paid too much. Workers should strive for mediocrity and never perform more than they have to in order to avoid getting pay raises and eventual termination... Slow and steady wins the race I guess...
As soon as I saw the headline the other day the first thing that came to mind is that they are cleaning house of all the union seekers, perhaps lumping them in with a bunch of others to hide the fact. However this will probably end up polarizing workers to unionize rather than to drive it out I would think as a result.
Don't have a lot of Agile experience, managers seem to love the "latest" (it isn't all that new) buzzword. I've found a lot of the principles are done anyway with a good back and forth relationship with the developers. However... I've noticed that doing rapid Agile type development exacerbates some of the existing challenges in testing, namely regression testing. Basically you have to be testing ALL the time. I'd have to block off essentially all my time for testing, whereas in less iterative approaches, you test for a specific release, go do other stuff you have to do for your job, then when the time comes, do some more testing on a release.
One of the PITA of testing that everyone will understand is regression testing where whatever it is that is being worked on, breaks something else, many times with no seeming connect (at least at the time). Anyway with more discrete releases I think it is easier to nail this down. However when there are constantly releases, of which any of them could break anything else, you just end up testing ad infinitum for the duration of the project. Which is fine if you have one project you work on. If you have a dozen projects all on the go, it becomes untenable. So I guess it is more of a resources issue that management might not understand. Also some of those principles of Agile basically box up failures into critical or not, which one would do normally anyway, but again due to the numbers involved, some of those non-critical can snowball into major issues, to which at that point it's too late. There seems to be a lot of, well with Agile, you just got to live with mistakes and move on and do more Agile, etc... Doesn't make for a very stable release ever.
All the meetings are supposed to facilitate better communication that is needed in such short intervals/iterations, however I've found wasted time where you're testing a function in the test environment, only to find out later you wasted your afternoon because the developers had already fixed it in the development environment, but it wasn't ready for deployment yet, etc...
Anyway not supposed to be a condemnation of Agile, but it has its issues, and is certainly not infallible or the fix that management might think it is. A flexible waterfall is just as good if not better in many situations. I don't know too many that do a strict waterfall anyway in reality, which is indeed somewhat cumbersome. Agile is the other end of the spectrum and at least in my opinion, just as cumbersome as it's opposite. I think much of these methodologies are a way for management to try to idiot proof or reduce the amount of skill required for any particular project. However reality is, if you get good developers, and good project management, business engagement and documentation, and testers that know what it is they are looking at you will always have better outcomes than less skilled, but following a strict methodology. Bottom line from a management perspective and project costs, methodology is free, and skill costs. However at the end of the day when looking at TCO it might not be, but then again, that might be another project and another manager, call it a success, put it on your resume "AGILE" and move on...
I'd also imagine it is a bit of a work in process, as the more times they reuse a single rocket, that extra inspection time is probably used to see which components fail first, how they might be redesigned to either last longer, be replaced easier and/or cheaper, etc... After every launch and inspection they likely refine what might be put into the next generation, then rise and repeat until a threshold of diminishing returns is hit barring technical innovation in regards to some bob or bit or material.
The short version of the explanation:
From the movie "True Lies"
Faisil: [in a conference room in their counter terrorism sector] They call him the Sand Spider.
Spencer Trilby: Why?
Faisil: Probably because it sounds scary.
i.e. because it sounds cool.
The way I see it they can justify it because of the Market. The Market being that everyone and his uncle are creating their own shitter streaming services, and charging about the same money for it. So they can basically point to a whole bunch of worse services charging about the same money and can they justify raising their price slight able because relatively speaking it is "worth" it. As I said I don't think this is anything that they have done, but rather their crappy competitors.
This was basically the criticism about Janeway. Not so much that she was a women, but rather that they overcompensated a great deal. She was Captain and expert in everything... Not sure why they even bothered with the rest of the crew other than to have people for her to talk with as she seemingly just did everything by her self. All other Star Trek crews had clear delineation of expertise and they would work as a team to solve whatever solution was needed... Heck in STTNG they even split off Kirk's 3 primary skills, 1) Command, Picard obviously, 2) Gorn destroying double axe handle fighting technique, Worf, and 3) The ability to slut around with alien lifeforms, Riker. This seems more of the same as Janeway the one woman wreaking machine other than she was *supposed* to be a Captain, but due to her trying to save everyone by herself (sound familiar), now has no rank.
Also I'll raise a Vulcan eyebrow at the addition of interstellar telepathy to the repertoire of her apparent skills... Though her neck pinch skills must suck if her former Captain simply woke up after a couple minutes.
30min trip, 3 hour security...
Also only for the extremely rich I'd reckon.
Though it does remind me of that Simpsons episode...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From the Summary:
"Apple said the move was done for consistency"
and
"Google is reportedly paying Apple $3 billion this year to remain as the default search engine on iPhones and iPads."
Sounds more like Apple likes to consistently receive 3 billion dollars...
Pretty sure this is where all those nasty moon spiders come from...
Which is exactly what happened.
What makes it worse, is that it happened in Canada on the Space Channel... There is no ^#%@ football on the space channel wtf! (Unless space football is created at some point, at which time I would definitely start watching it!)
I get it was delayed on CBS, but they really had to delay it in Canada as well?
Consoles only have two advantages really, and even then not even that is secure.
#1 Consoles have the ability to be plugged into your TV, and use controllers. The whole controller VS keyboard/mouse argument aside it is nice to be able to sit my ass on a couch for hours at a time to play Skyrim or whatever. That said, there is absolutely nothing stopping people with a PC from hooking it up to their TV and buying a controller if they really want to now. Only difference is one take a small bit of configuring while the other is automatic.
#2 Cost. A console is a lot cheaper than a PC. Though one could argue that the specs on those consoles make it an unfair comparison to a fully fledged gaming PC. However it is still a bit less expensive than a cheapo PC gaming rig. That said, years ago I had my Xbox360 and all my games stolen. I had to make a list for the insurance company. The problem with the above argument is that console makers have inflated their game prices a lot over the years. At 75$ plus tax per game it adds up. I think I got nearly 2000$ and a very large chunk of that was console games. How much was that PC gaming rig that you play DOTA2 on for free again....? So yeah I don't think the ToC is as disparate as it is made out to be.
[as the Federation ships prepare to fire on the dark planet]
Scientist's Aide: Its structure has just solidified on the surface.
Head Scientist: I think it's anticipating the attack. Anticipation denotes intelligence.
Priest Vito Cornelius: The most terrible intelligence imaginable, Mr. President.
I hear he tends to shoot from the hip so take what he says with a grain of salt...
I'll add two similar comments. The first is that your first statement is completely correct. In first hand experience I was in a temporary position for some time, it finally came up for permanent, and I competed for it. After it was all said and done the cancelled the entire thing. When brought in by several managers to tell me the fun news, I noted that there had been other positions that had been posted after, and successfully filled within that time. I was told the reason point blank that my position was not part of "core business". I was flabbergasted. I mentioned to them if the systems I manage go down or have issues, none of those "core business" people are doing any work whatsoever. I received a bunch of blank stares and that is about it. It was only through a later reorg I got out of that area and onto better things where I appear to be more valued.
Secondly, which is really a combo of the two points, in many cases, your value is only in terms of a current or particular project. No one wants to keep staff on, they just want things done and move on. Which means you get short term tenure, a revolving door of IT. I wouldn't be surprised in the case of Equifax that the security setup and the rest was all done by either external consultants, or by folks brought on for that particular "project" all of who have since moved on. They probably indicated that a system like that needs to be constantly maintained and monitored, and management said "yea sure", and handed it off to the handful of overworked general IT boffins they use to do everything. It could be that patching the security vulnerability was on their "to do" list but when your work is basically an ever expanding exercise in triage, and you tend to do things your immediate manager cares about (which isn't some security patch which *might* be an issue) it could be that they just didn't have the time to get around to it, a couple of months can fly by pretty quick. So yeah, you earn your breaches.
A how do you make something "binding". At this scale that's pretty hard to do. Anyone going to tank their own economy by applying economic sanctions on the US or China? Military?
I mean about the only thing is trying to not look like an asshole on the international stage. I'm not sure Trump cares all so much about that either.
"a voluntary non-binding commitment, where you set your own terms that you can then ignore" I think that pretty much describes all agreements, in particular the environmental kind.
As individual countries, everything is "voluntary". What kind of "binding commitment" is ever made that can't be broken with little or no repercussions for an individual country. Countries regularly set their own terms and then ignore them for everything. Looking back a previous examples, I don't think any of them are ever met.
Anyway not to belittle the symbolic nature of the idea, and to get countries talking about it. I'm just always astounded by the assertion that a country isn't going to do whatever it wants. This is literally what politics is. I mean if a country didn't meet targets, then what? Economic sanctions? On the US for example LOL? Again it is all politics, and to a certain point just theatrics with these sorts of things. Trump just wants to come out tough for his base, then "re-negotiate" to make himself look good, all with little or no repercussion. As mentioned, whatever it is will probably be ignored, and the time frame to which it will take place will be outside his term of office anyway...
Not to mention I think many are of the mind that the US is constantly circumventing NAFTA, and what the point of a pact if one of the members only abide by it when they feel like it. Things like the softwood lumber issue when Canada has already won in the courts, and it looks like it is going to happen all over again. The whole "Buy America" policies, etc... However this isn't a Trump thing, these are systemic issues that have been around since the start really.
It's genius really.
Refuse the PCCA, and you come out on top with your base.
"Re-negotiate", set some made up goals (like most do anyway, and on a time scale outside of your term in office), and you become the "Deal Maker"...
Basically you get to look tough, then a savvy negotiator, and "get stuff done" which you can totally lie about progress because of the time frame.
That's like a political trifecta!