I'm guessing you made big bets on the stock market going down. Or you make a lot of money based on millions of Americans having to wade through an incomprehensibly complex tax code. Or you employ a lot of manual labor that comes illegally across the border. Or maybe you make a lot of money abusing the H1B visa system? Be careful how you gamble on the next couple of election cycles.
How is this "off topic?" TFS comes right out and describes Clinton's loss as a disaster, implying that the lack of human editorial oversight at FB is responsible for that disaster. The OP couldn't have BEEN more politically tilted on that front, and it's entire point is to make something that's not much of anything (a handful of Russian ads) sound like a disaster only because of the political outcome the author didn't want.
It has become increasingly apparent over the past year that building systems without humans "in the loop" -- especially in the case of Facebook and the ads it linked to 470 "inauthentic" Russian-backed accounts -- can lead to disastrous outcomes
Because... a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of FB ads actually caused people who loved Hillary to suddenly vote for the person they hated? This non-sly bit of editorializing (that the Clintons not regaining power to sell access from the White House was a "disaster" brought on by social media externalities) is laughable. Insufficient human involvement in FB's ad-processing may indeed have allowed some pot-stirring foreigners to run ads, but they also allowed an endless stream of domestically-passed-around fake news and toxic memes that were vitriolically and relentlessly anti-Trump to saturate news feeds in the months leading up to the election. None of these things somehow tricked Clinton into regularly showing her patronizing contempt for flyover-country voters. Hillary Clinton wasn't somehow persuaded by Russian ads to blow off even setting foot in Wisconsin while expecting that state to giver her their electoral college votes anyway. The Democrats didn't lose a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships and both houses of congress during the Obama administration because of minuscule Russian FB ad buys in 2016. This reference to FB's ads buys leading to "disaster" is just another disingenuous attempt to deflect from what really happened.
If there's a "disaster" to describe, it would be the shocking amount of cash the Democrats spent and the celebrity-entertainment-news-industrial-complex expenditure of good will and political capital that was spectacularly squandered in trying to convince people to vote for a chilly, robotically unlikable scold of a candidate with no constructive message and a long record of corruption... who characterized herself entitlement to power based on gender, and who promised to use the Supreme Court as a new legislature. What a huge waste of time and resources.
Your laughable moral relativism is hilarious, truly. In other words, you really are fine if the people at the top of the administration charge the Secret Service rent on their properties, as long as it's the next guy in line to be president, and not the MORAL OUTRAGE of it being the guy he works with as his boss. So, if Obama had been hit by lightning, and Biden suddenly became president, THEN you'd have suddenly considered his making money off of security detail to be an impeachment-worthy activity. But morally and ethically, it was just fine an hour earlier. Gotcha!
So you must be REALLY relieved now that that criminal Joe Biden is out of office, since he was charging the Secret Service rent to house people on his property in Delaware, right? Right? No? They just haven't gotten around to arresting him for that yet? No? I see.
Violations of the two emoluments clauses should do nicely.
Cool! So, obviously there are any number of faithful career federal law enforcement people who have the same evidence you do of actual violations. Gotcha! These must be brand NEW violations, of course, since there hasn't been any such thing to pursue for the last year. The two violations you seem to have secret knowledge of, and won't detail here beyond vague hand-waving, must have occurred... since last week, maybe? I'm sure some of the rabid anti-Trump news outlets would love the scoop if you'll share with them.
Deflect from Russian scandals? I'm pointing out the real, actual Russian scandals. The Russian-bundled deposits into the Clinton family business in an amount well over a hundred million dollars is a matter of public record. Bill Clinton's acceptance of half a million dollars in cash (directly, to him, not laundered through the family business) is a matter of public record, and occurred in precise coordination with his wife, the Secretary of State, signing off on a huge energy deal favorable to Putin.
Meanwhile, there continues to be exactly zero evidence of Trump having anything whatsoever to do with the Russians placing ads on Facebook or anything else that you seem to think caused millions of Democrats to not vote for yer when they otherwise would have.
The Clintons HAVE been under scrutiny ever since Bill was in Arkansas politics, because they've been operating corruptly ever since then. Dozens of their associates have ended up being thrown under the Clinton bus and had their careers ended, been convicted of crimes, and lost their fortunes, even as these two people because fantastically wealthy while only ever holding jobs as public employees. She sent her own White House staff out to smear the reputations of the women her predator of a husband abused, has lied her way through endless hearings and testimony, and you LOVE her for it. That's fine. Just admit it. You like her so much that you actually approve of her looking you in the eye and lying because you wanted her to get back the political power that she and her husband used to make themselves incredibly rich. And a healthy dose of that money came from Russia, along with several other awful sources. But you like it that way! Just admit it, and relax.
So what you're saying is that Trump used his Russian-made Temporal Collusion Time Machine to go back to before he was in office, and destroyed it. Please try to get all these details out, OK?
Are there any laws anywhere that would protect TV owners from such intrusive advertising?
Yes, the law of supply and demand. Don't buy a device you don't like. There are plenty of non-smart devices out there, with HDMI ports that let you apply whatever degree of smartness or dumbness you want. And they're cheaper.
Quit pretending that you don't understand the point. The Dems are still so annoyed that their poorly chosen candidate didn't win (and that they've lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, and millions of two-time Obama voters who turned away in disgust) that they're STILL trying to excuse it away as being the Russians' fault, with fictional help from the Trump campaign. Somehow, the Democrats figure, the Russians used expert advice from the person too stupid to be president to use special mind-control powers to convince Hillary Clinton to forget to even set foot once in states like Wisconsin, while being careful to call the people in fly-over states irredeemably deplorable racists and worse... and that, the mind control thing, is how she lost. It had nothing whatsoever to do with her looking everyone in the eye and lying non-stop for a year about her conduct as Secretary Of State. Or her mishandling of classified information, or her spectacularly robotic, smug behavior.
So, when the Dems insist that it was Trump/Russia to blame, it IS appropriate to talk about Clinton's own cozy (and cash-flush) relationship with the Russians as a way to illustrate the degree of hypocrisy in the way the mainstream press is trying to keep the fiction alive. Your own snark on the subject is a strong indicator of just how appropriate those observations still are to make.
The party that organizes the primaries and the debates and provides back-end infrastructure and party-wide support (say, through the DNC) is - when putting its thumb on the scale in the favor of the politician that has just literally bought control of the party's committee - rigging things.
You're right. And you should DEFINITELY never drive your car to personally see and experience the Grand Canyon, because there is a very non-trivial risk to your life by getting in a car on the road. High def photos are certainly a better bet, given the risk.
I should listen to you, and only trust NASA to design and operate space-related things. They only blow up and kill people sometimes.
No, a bubble produces irrationally high stock prices in companies that don't actually deliver any value. Amazon is now conducting roughly half of all online retail, and many other things besides. Unless you're suggesting that e-commerce is just a fad, like tulips, then you're completely missing why their stock has so steadily grown for decades.
It's the employer's company. He can do with it and with his own money as he sees fit. Why should anyone but the boss (or his investors, depending on the arrangement), get to fire him for his political leanings? But if you're an employee and don't like how he spends his money, you can certainly quit.
The employer doesn't pay the union, the employees do. Just, so you know next time.
Do you really believe the things you say? Are you actually convinced that once a news operation's employees unionize that their new collective bargaining arrangement won't increase the payroll overhead for the employer? That's the whole POINT of unionizing - to get more out of the employment arrangement than the employer would otherwise be able or inclined to pay. The costs of unionizing are passed along to the employer (and to the employer's customers), by definition.
Would you fly into space with a company owned by a CEO of a company that can't make a sensible web page?
You're right. Amazon is a total failure. They don't stand a CHANCE up against traditional book stores and other brick-and-mortar retailers. And SHIPPING things to people? Nobody trusts that. They can't possibly provide a way for people to know when things will ship, or get them there quickly - total incompetence. And next thing you know, they're probably going to make some laughable attempt to start selling some pie-in-the-sky "cloud" services while will obviously be a total failure. The fact that their stock has gone up by several thousand percent is a sure sign that you're right about what a terrible, untrustworthy operation they are.
Please. A guy who's using his personal cash to prop up money-losing city-branded "news" web sites decides that there's no prospect of the operations continuing, especially if his employees decide to install the overhead associated with paying union bosses and having to treat every employee as if they are all equally productive, motivated, resourceful, dedicated, and generally as valuable as the next. So he bows to the inevitable and shuts down to stop the bleeding. The OP, of course, has to spin this as Eeeevil Corporatism and the usual histrionics.
I wonder how the OP feels about the fact that the National Geographic media operation was quickly and spectacularly swirling the toiled and about to fold and take hundreds of jobs with it, without a single white knight showing up to bail them out and fix what was broken, except for (horror! tragedy!) Rupert Murdoch. Now they're back on their feet and solvent and writers, photographers, production people and the rest still have jobs there. Eeeeevil corporatism! Except it wouldn't have been evil if a notably lefty billionaire had used one of his companies to buy NatGeo, in which case that would have been great for journalism and everything else, la la la.
Paying professional people to produce media for an audience is a business. If it can't survive without generous patronage, then it needs to die and be reborn as part of someone's foundation or other personal project, or simply die because it can't produce the value that everyone working there wants to take home every week. Buggy whip factories, etc.
Trump tweets some obnoxious crap almost continuously, and therefor I should be mad at CNN.
Are they spending hours and hours every day fetishistically obsessed with those tweets and pretending that nothing else is happening? Yes. So, yeah, you could get mad at them, or turn them off.
No, Manning wasn't a hero. He was a guy who said he was unhappy at his chosen career, and was in drama-queen mode. In order to scratch that drama itch, he casually spread around untold thousands of classified documents without any critical thought or any ethical attempt to point out any sort of incorrect behavior. He was simply dumping sensitive information for the sake of personal attention, and he didn't care or even know what he was dishing out. Moron, traitor, liar, etc... not hero, at all.
And if they can't find any news that directly supports their chosen narrative, they simply make some up. If it's so bad they get caught red handed doing it, then they have to publicly fire people for doing it. Which has happened more than once recently, as it was bad enough even by THEIR standards of fake news that they had no choice.
"CNN just reports the news" - that is truly hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
Trump's victory is the disaster.
I'm guessing you made big bets on the stock market going down. Or you make a lot of money based on millions of Americans having to wade through an incomprehensibly complex tax code. Or you employ a lot of manual labor that comes illegally across the border. Or maybe you make a lot of money abusing the H1B visa system? Be careful how you gamble on the next couple of election cycles.
How is this "off topic?" TFS comes right out and describes Clinton's loss as a disaster, implying that the lack of human editorial oversight at FB is responsible for that disaster. The OP couldn't have BEEN more politically tilted on that front, and it's entire point is to make something that's not much of anything (a handful of Russian ads) sound like a disaster only because of the political outcome the author didn't want.
It has become increasingly apparent over the past year that building systems without humans "in the loop" -- especially in the case of Facebook and the ads it linked to 470 "inauthentic" Russian-backed accounts -- can lead to disastrous outcomes
Because ... a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of FB ads actually caused people who loved Hillary to suddenly vote for the person they hated? This non-sly bit of editorializing (that the Clintons not regaining power to sell access from the White House was a "disaster" brought on by social media externalities) is laughable. Insufficient human involvement in FB's ad-processing may indeed have allowed some pot-stirring foreigners to run ads, but they also allowed an endless stream of domestically-passed-around fake news and toxic memes that were vitriolically and relentlessly anti-Trump to saturate news feeds in the months leading up to the election. None of these things somehow tricked Clinton into regularly showing her patronizing contempt for flyover-country voters. Hillary Clinton wasn't somehow persuaded by Russian ads to blow off even setting foot in Wisconsin while expecting that state to giver her their electoral college votes anyway. The Democrats didn't lose a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships and both houses of congress during the Obama administration because of minuscule Russian FB ad buys in 2016. This reference to FB's ads buys leading to "disaster" is just another disingenuous attempt to deflect from what really happened.
... who characterized herself entitlement to power based on gender, and who promised to use the Supreme Court as a new legislature. What a huge waste of time and resources.
If there's a "disaster" to describe, it would be the shocking amount of cash the Democrats spent and the celebrity-entertainment-news-industrial-complex expenditure of good will and political capital that was spectacularly squandered in trying to convince people to vote for a chilly, robotically unlikable scold of a candidate with no constructive message and a long record of corruption
They aren't progressives.
Sure they are. Progressives just aren't what you wish they were.
Your laughable moral relativism is hilarious, truly. In other words, you really are fine if the people at the top of the administration charge the Secret Service rent on their properties, as long as it's the next guy in line to be president, and not the MORAL OUTRAGE of it being the guy he works with as his boss. So, if Obama had been hit by lightning, and Biden suddenly became president, THEN you'd have suddenly considered his making money off of security detail to be an impeachment-worthy activity. But morally and ethically, it was just fine an hour earlier. Gotcha!
And yet, you were reading about IBM.
So you must be REALLY relieved now that that criminal Joe Biden is out of office, since he was charging the Secret Service rent to house people on his property in Delaware, right? Right? No? They just haven't gotten around to arresting him for that yet? No? I see.
Violations of the two emoluments clauses should do nicely.
Cool! So, obviously there are any number of faithful career federal law enforcement people who have the same evidence you do of actual violations. Gotcha! These must be brand NEW violations, of course, since there hasn't been any such thing to pursue for the last year. The two violations you seem to have secret knowledge of, and won't detail here beyond vague hand-waving, must have occurred... since last week, maybe? I'm sure some of the rabid anti-Trump news outlets would love the scoop if you'll share with them.
I can't teach all treasonous Republikkkan faggots how to read, not enough time.
In other words, you've got nothing. Thanks!
Try to keep it together until the impeachment, ok?
Wow, sounds exciting! Hey, could you run down the list of specific crimes for which that impeachment is going to take place? Thanks.
Deflect from Russian scandals? I'm pointing out the real, actual Russian scandals. The Russian-bundled deposits into the Clinton family business in an amount well over a hundred million dollars is a matter of public record. Bill Clinton's acceptance of half a million dollars in cash (directly, to him, not laundered through the family business) is a matter of public record, and occurred in precise coordination with his wife, the Secretary of State, signing off on a huge energy deal favorable to Putin.
Meanwhile, there continues to be exactly zero evidence of Trump having anything whatsoever to do with the Russians placing ads on Facebook or anything else that you seem to think caused millions of Democrats to not vote for yer when they otherwise would have.
The Clintons HAVE been under scrutiny ever since Bill was in Arkansas politics, because they've been operating corruptly ever since then. Dozens of their associates have ended up being thrown under the Clinton bus and had their careers ended, been convicted of crimes, and lost their fortunes, even as these two people because fantastically wealthy while only ever holding jobs as public employees. She sent her own White House staff out to smear the reputations of the women her predator of a husband abused, has lied her way through endless hearings and testimony, and you LOVE her for it. That's fine. Just admit it. You like her so much that you actually approve of her looking you in the eye and lying because you wanted her to get back the political power that she and her husband used to make themselves incredibly rich. And a healthy dose of that money came from Russia, along with several other awful sources. But you like it that way! Just admit it, and relax.
The $58 million satellite was dismantled in 2016
So what you're saying is that Trump used his Russian-made Temporal Collusion Time Machine to go back to before he was in office, and destroyed it. Please try to get all these details out, OK?
Are there any laws anywhere that would protect TV owners from such intrusive advertising?
Yes, the law of supply and demand. Don't buy a device you don't like. There are plenty of non-smart devices out there, with HDMI ports that let you apply whatever degree of smartness or dumbness you want. And they're cheaper.
This.
Quit pretending that you don't understand the point. The Dems are still so annoyed that their poorly chosen candidate didn't win (and that they've lost nearly a thousand legislative seats, most of the governorships, both houses of congress, and millions of two-time Obama voters who turned away in disgust) that they're STILL trying to excuse it away as being the Russians' fault, with fictional help from the Trump campaign. Somehow, the Democrats figure, the Russians used expert advice from the person too stupid to be president to use special mind-control powers to convince Hillary Clinton to forget to even set foot once in states like Wisconsin, while being careful to call the people in fly-over states irredeemably deplorable racists and worse ... and that, the mind control thing, is how she lost. It had nothing whatsoever to do with her looking everyone in the eye and lying non-stop for a year about her conduct as Secretary Of State. Or her mishandling of classified information, or her spectacularly robotic, smug behavior.
So, when the Dems insist that it was Trump/Russia to blame, it IS appropriate to talk about Clinton's own cozy (and cash-flush) relationship with the Russians as a way to illustrate the degree of hypocrisy in the way the mainstream press is trying to keep the fiction alive. Your own snark on the subject is a strong indicator of just how appropriate those observations still are to make.
The party that organizes the primaries and the debates and provides back-end infrastructure and party-wide support (say, through the DNC) is - when putting its thumb on the scale in the favor of the politician that has just literally bought control of the party's committee - rigging things.
You're right. And you should DEFINITELY never drive your car to personally see and experience the Grand Canyon, because there is a very non-trivial risk to your life by getting in a car on the road. High def photos are certainly a better bet, given the risk.
I should listen to you, and only trust NASA to design and operate space-related things. They only blow up and kill people sometimes.
No, it's a sure sign of the bubble they are in.
No, a bubble produces irrationally high stock prices in companies that don't actually deliver any value. Amazon is now conducting roughly half of all online retail, and many other things besides. Unless you're suggesting that e-commerce is just a fad, like tulips, then you're completely missing why their stock has so steadily grown for decades.
It's the employer's company. He can do with it and with his own money as he sees fit. Why should anyone but the boss (or his investors, depending on the arrangement), get to fire him for his political leanings? But if you're an employee and don't like how he spends his money, you can certainly quit.
The employer doesn't pay the union, the employees do. Just, so you know next time.
Do you really believe the things you say? Are you actually convinced that once a news operation's employees unionize that their new collective bargaining arrangement won't increase the payroll overhead for the employer? That's the whole POINT of unionizing - to get more out of the employment arrangement than the employer would otherwise be able or inclined to pay. The costs of unionizing are passed along to the employer (and to the employer's customers), by definition.
Would you fly into space with a company owned by a CEO of a company that can't make a sensible web page?
You're right. Amazon is a total failure. They don't stand a CHANCE up against traditional book stores and other brick-and-mortar retailers. And SHIPPING things to people? Nobody trusts that. They can't possibly provide a way for people to know when things will ship, or get them there quickly - total incompetence. And next thing you know, they're probably going to make some laughable attempt to start selling some pie-in-the-sky "cloud" services while will obviously be a total failure. The fact that their stock has gone up by several thousand percent is a sure sign that you're right about what a terrible, untrustworthy operation they are.
Please. A guy who's using his personal cash to prop up money-losing city-branded "news" web sites decides that there's no prospect of the operations continuing, especially if his employees decide to install the overhead associated with paying union bosses and having to treat every employee as if they are all equally productive, motivated, resourceful, dedicated, and generally as valuable as the next. So he bows to the inevitable and shuts down to stop the bleeding. The OP, of course, has to spin this as Eeeevil Corporatism and the usual histrionics.
I wonder how the OP feels about the fact that the National Geographic media operation was quickly and spectacularly swirling the toiled and about to fold and take hundreds of jobs with it, without a single white knight showing up to bail them out and fix what was broken, except for (horror! tragedy!) Rupert Murdoch. Now they're back on their feet and solvent and writers, photographers, production people and the rest still have jobs there. Eeeeevil corporatism! Except it wouldn't have been evil if a notably lefty billionaire had used one of his companies to buy NatGeo, in which case that would have been great for journalism and everything else, la la la.
Paying professional people to produce media for an audience is a business. If it can't survive without generous patronage, then it needs to die and be reborn as part of someone's foundation or other personal project, or simply die because it can't produce the value that everyone working there wants to take home every week. Buggy whip factories, etc.
Trump tweets some obnoxious crap almost continuously, and therefor I should be mad at CNN.
Are they spending hours and hours every day fetishistically obsessed with those tweets and pretending that nothing else is happening? Yes. So, yeah, you could get mad at them, or turn them off.
No, Manning wasn't a hero. He was a guy who said he was unhappy at his chosen career, and was in drama-queen mode. In order to scratch that drama itch, he casually spread around untold thousands of classified documents without any critical thought or any ethical attempt to point out any sort of incorrect behavior. He was simply dumping sensitive information for the sake of personal attention, and he didn't care or even know what he was dishing out. Moron, traitor, liar, etc ... not hero, at all.
CNN just reports the news
And if they can't find any news that directly supports their chosen narrative, they simply make some up. If it's so bad they get caught red handed doing it, then they have to publicly fire people for doing it. Which has happened more than once recently, as it was bad enough even by THEIR standards of fake news that they had no choice.
"CNN just reports the news" - that is truly hilarious.