You need to recheck your cultural superiority complex. You can tell yourself that the Chinese don't "innovate" to help yourself feel better but that doesn't make it true. The uncomfortable truth is that state sanctioned hacking and stealing of foreign technology is a part of China's innovation. China turned its 1.4 billion citizens, that was once consider to be a burden, ie too many mouth to feed, into the world's biggest honeypot to lure in foreign corporations and siphons off their trade secrets through technology transfer. Furthermore, the communist Chinese government morphed its entire populace into a workforce for the capitalistic market, turning what was once a dirt poor agrarian nation into a economic power house. That's not innovation?
Take a look at China's high speed rail infrastructure, emerging aviation industry, military industry, space program, and tech sector. Sure, most of them were co-opted from foreign sources, but China has succeeded in incorporating them into their industrial DNA, with unmistakable "Chinese" characteristics.
China walls off foreign tech companies, nurtures its own nascent tech sector, then those tech companies IPO in foreign stock exchanges, hauling in foreign cash to further grow in their protected tech sector. That's not innovation?
That generation of older Chinese whom you derisively believe has a herd mentality, is currently trampling the world consumer markets with Chinese made products, automating their factories, and buying up real estates worldwide. Oh', and those Chinese who dare to do better than their bosses, becomes their own boss, further quickening the pace of innovation though marketplace competition.
Sure, rural Japan can be very racist. They will politely refuse you service, or simply ignore you. Unlike rural US, where American racist will simply kill or main you. That's is the difference between the rural Japanese racists and rural American racists.
Oh', it gets worst. A guy like Donald Trump, who insinuates assassination of his political opponents, openly asks his political opponents be locked up without sound legal justifications, labels the free press as the enemy of the people, is elected presidents then sends his armed Secret Service agents to the home of a prominent dissident comedian because the comedian's criticism of the president may incite people to violence. And yes, Donald Trump's base still blindly supports him and he regularly showers them with vitriolic campaign rallies.
I will never forgive the Republican party, nor will I forget the devil's bargain between the hypocrite religious conservatives and the morally bankrupt Donald Trump. I look forward to the day when Trump is removed from the White House.
However, Taiwan is a democracy with protection for basic human rights. You can freely fly the Chinese flag and openly advocate Taiwan is a part of China. Try doing the reverse in China will most likely result in imprisonment. That is the biggest difference between Taiwan and China.
Oh', that China vs China argument is a Chinese construct. The Chinese position is, if Taiwan renounces its Chinese territorial claim then that's justification for invasion; if Taiwan continues its Chinese territorial claim, that too is justification for invasion.
We are in multiple trade wars with multiple democratic allies of ours. Allies that share our democratic ideals, share our common defense, and are not actively trying to undermine our global economic and military leadership position. Yet, we are openly helping authoritarian countries that violated our sanctions, aim their missiles at us, rams our ship and planes. Let's not kid ourselves. In authoritarian states, all large companies are organs of the state, subject to the bidding of the government. Helping companies in China is no different than helping the Chinese government itself. ZTE is a prime example.
Do evangelicals know that China actively suppressed the Christian faith and all non state-organized religion in China? Doesn't Fox News cover this topic?
Given China lackluster record in "integrating" the hearts and minds of the Hong Kong residents, who were basically tossed to the wolves by the British after 99 years of dutifully generated revenues for the British Empire. Despite some last minute electoral reforms by the British prior to the 1997 hand over to China, Hong Kong was basically a colonial subject of the Crown without a tradition of electing its own executives.
Taiwan, on the other hand, thanks to continuous US intervention since WWII, has blossomed into a fractious democracy, along with the requisite shares of protests, counter-protesters, counter-counter-protests.... and etc. Streets protest is almost a national past time, enjoyed by all demographic, from the young to the old, regardless of sexual orientation, or ethnic origin. Not to mentioned that unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has its own military.
Whether or not Taiwan's military that is being rapidly eclipsed by the Chinese military can hold its own against the Chinese is a vexing question for the island residents. However, the strategic value of loosing Taiwan to China mean loosing our pave paws radar in Taiwan, loosing our first island of defense against China and allowing China to control the sea lane that connects Japan and Korea to the half the world and their oil supply.
Taiwan also has a fairly globalized semiconductor sector. Any disruption will be felt across the world. Any damage to Taiwan's infrastructure means rapid price inflation for anything good with semiconductor inside. Fab equipment aren't usually the type people can buy in quantities immediately.
Given the rise of authoritarian China, the long term strategic and short term financial importance of a democratic Taiwan to people who enjoy free speech, especially in the digital medium, cannot be overstated.
Sadly, to our smarter-than-thou president, it's all tl;dr. He is just happy to have found his NK mini-me.
Any idiot can start a war, but to win a war we need leaders with vision and teamwork. Do you see any of those traits in the current Trump administration?
As much as I love to see a vibrant domestic manufacturing sector, I don't think most American cares. We decimated our own manufacturing sector with our financial sector and tax codes favoring speculative investments in real estate and the stock market. Did the recent BIG Trump tax reform changed any of that?
I view China as an adversary to the democratic societies, and I am itching for the US to take action against the rising authoritarian capitalistic China. Yet, I am not stupid. Any war with Trump in charge will be a disaster for us. Trump's courage is defined by his Vietnam War deferments while his business acumen is defined by his four bankruptcies. Unless war is like reality television, I fear for the worst under Trump.
In the last couple decades, I've witnessed the transformation of the NRA from a firearm advocacy group into the armed wing of a very specific type of social conservatives, the Fox News social conservatives that worship Trump as their messiah. I don't know how their "Christian Values" can reconcile with their moral dexterity in accepting an serial sexual predator.
NRA has no business giving awards to a telecommunication lobbyist that has done little to advocate for firearm owners, except as a swampy favor to its new buddy Trump. This is the type of crony capitalism NRA used to nuts over during the Clinton years.
I used to enjoy reading American Rifleman but I started to question NRA's political stance during the GWB years when our Constitution was tramped by the Patriot Acts. By the Obama years, I skip all the political articles and stopped all donations. These days, I don't even bother reading the American Rifleman. The only reason I didn't cancel the subscription is because I don't feel like saving the NRA any money.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that unchecked proliferation of high capacity magazine fed semi automatic rifles in a polarized society with limited social safety net will eventually lead to the carnage we are witnessing today. We keep this up, in a few years we'll have open street warfare between the various armed militias, all vying to protect their own interpretation our Constitution from each other.
Please don't try to justify your own racism with ignorance. The abbreviation for Japan is JPN. The Kanji character you are referring has several meaning, and most likely means "Sun" when used to refer to Japan. However, the racial slur you presented is not how it is pronounced.
They did not abbreviate their nationality down to one syllable, you did that all by your racist ignorant self.
Um, post WWII Japan after WWII, with its pacifist constitution is a protected state of the US. Japan is also a democracy. None of those is true for China. China is building up its economy and military to directly challenge the US. China believes its prefect blend of authoritarian capitalism is a superior system to our flawed democracy. A better comparison will be to compare China to pre WWII Japan.
Yup, I worry about that too. Sure, China's c919 is no where as good as a 737 or a A320, and no sane airline executive will want them. However, the Chinese government can mandate adaption by domestic Chinese airlines for domestic routes. Slowly but surely, they will improve while we sit on our collect fat ass thinking we're the best and greatest civilization under God.
It doesn't take a genius to see the incremental steps China is taking, but our politicians simply don't care enough to look beyond their next election cycle.
Aviation is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait till you start looking into how the Chinese government is actively encouraging and developing factory automation. Sadly we are too dumb to realized China is not post-war Japan/Germany. China is pre-war Japan and Germany combined.
You mean the conservative media kept mentioning the shooter is white? None of the main stream media is stressing the ethnicity of the shooter, just his name. just like they don't stress the ethnicity of the shooter had he/she been name "Abdul Fatah."
I don't understand why Ivanka is involved with this project. Sure, we need more women in STEM, but I feel that Ivanka has always been more about the superficial feel good cosmetic of sales and marketing, antithetic to unglamorous logic driven grunt work of STEM. Oh', I forgot, she is the president's daughter.
Other may disagrees, but I look at this as a $200 million dollar public funded campaign effort to groom Ivanka for the Trump dynasty.
China was exploited for centuries not because of Western nations, but because of its inept authoritarian government. Let's not forget the last Dynasty in China, Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), was basically a foreign power (The Manchurians) ruling China for 200+ years. The equivalence of Mexico ruling over the US.
Kudos to the Chinese Communist Party for what? Creating a repressive fascist state where the Communist elites wreck the environment and absconded with their riches to live in Western nations, the very countries they teach their countrymen to despise.
Nation with wounded pride, A growing economic and military power, Zero interest in dissenting views. Ideologically driven single party rule.
I think we've all seen that script before and it was a disaster for everyone, especially the middle class.
BTW: you'll have to actually provide evidence for this, can't just mention a bad outcome and assert bigotry. You might be thinking about the case of Colin Kaepernick, but he was just a bad player. He problably saw a bad future coming and decided to ahead of it by becoming a political activist, so he could play the victim card.
You mean the author of the Google memo? Programmer with poor interpersonal skills and lacks good social judgment, who decided to seek political martyrdom.
My thought exactly. Of all the news outlet available, we resort to citing RT for USAF activities. C'mon, we should be better than this . . . . We have plenty of domestic conspiracy theory news source, no need to rely on Putin's mouth piece.
It's not so funny when the government locks you up because you criticize the validity of an Xinhua article. That is the everyday reality faced by Chinese residents and that is the biggest difference between the state-run Xinhua and the state-funded BBC.
Science or not, funneling American wealth to third world countries via a non-binding agreement is enough of a reason to oppose participation in this treaty and to be glad it was never submitted to be potentially ratified.
I wish I had mod points for you. You get it. Sadly, many here do not.....
I don't think you get it either. Where have you been in the last 16h years? The Iraq War, and the still on going may be escalating Afghanistan War has cost us over $2+ Trillions and counting. You think wealth didn't transfer from the American people into the pockets of the few who profited from the never ending war?
Charity goes both ways, immediately after 9/11, we were the biggest recipient of world charity. Some countries even sent their kids off to a foreign land to help us fight our war?...hmmm...where was Russia back then?
Please stop using the same tired straw men argument to justify isolationist views. You have no problem with wealth transfer and charity as long if they serve your own ideology.
Simplicity is good but don't forget curiosity. For shareholders, the consequence of having a self promoter con man as CEO is the possibility of loosing equity in the company. Looking at Donald Trump's past bankruptcies is a good indication of specular profits for Donald himself at the detriment of his shareholders.
Now that business man Donald Trump is the president. We, the American people are the shareholders left holding the empty bag as Donald's family profits from his latest scheme.
Technology cuts both ways. I will sleep better at night if I know the advance killing equipments all require billions of R&D and billions more in manufacturing supply chain/infrastructure, rather than something that can be 3d printed in a cave. Of course, if you're the person in a cave with a 3d printer, this is probably an uplifting news. . . .
One of the core reasons why US manufacturer's can't complete is that our tax policy favors gains from the speculative market, ie real estate and stock market, over the actual manufacturing of products. Another core reason is that the American consumers simply wants cheap products made in an authoritarian country that is actively competing with us militarily and economically, with the goal of becoming the dominate power in the world.
At the end, we only have ourselves to blame. We voted for the politicians who set fiscal policies that decimated our manufacturing base, and we simply like to buy cheap crap from China.
Keep this up, and China will bankrupt us in the coming arms/space race, much like how we did it to the USSR.
Putin is not interested in destroying ISIS. He is only interested in propping up his failed proxy puppet state, Assad's Syria. ISIS just happens to be one of Assad's enemies. Assad is in a mess because he chooses to torture then kill underage boys who drew unflattering graffiti of him. That's the type of person Putin is protecting in Syria.
Putin is playing chess while Trump is still player checkers. Putin is more than happy to push ISIS out of Syria and let the rest of the world, particularly the West, deal with ISIS. Actually that's probably his plan. Let ISIS attack the West and push the civil liberties in the West to the breaking point, then he can claim moral equivalency [see O'Reilly Trump interview.]
Oh', Syria's buddy, Iran, also has troops in Syria fighting "ISIS" on behalf of Assad.
Let's not forget about the 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 200+ US Marines. That suicide bombing has Syria and Iran's fingerprints all over it. 33 years later, the same type of anti-American leadership are still running Syria, Iran, and Russia. They are now our friends??? I don't think so.
The whole Middle East is one big mess. I don't like Obama's timid response, but given the tangled interests and the fact that Obama was still cleaning up after the our last great checker player, GWB, I can understand his hesitation. He can do the right thing, fight for freedom and democracy that will consume a lot of his dwindling political capital, in addition to requiring even more planning, materials and American lives, and hope the average American will understand. Or, he can be a politician and drags his feet toward doing as little as possible, which is exactly what happened.
I agree that any public figure, in any fields, needs to be held accountable for their public comments. Modonna's comment was inappropriate.
However, let's not equivocate the actions of a popular singer with worldwide following with that of a major party candidate running for the presidency of the United States, who now has the power to affect lives worldwide.
"By the way, and if she gets to pick --if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know. " - Aug. 9, 2016, Donald Trump
I don't believe in that BS about "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservatives." To me, they are often just meaningless labels applied without proper context. Meaningless sound bits meant for the mindless consumers who outsourced their thinking to the same media elites they dislike so much.
Trump has turned the White House into a reality TV set. Eerily similar to that of his shirtless horse riding buddy's own reality kleptocratic TV show.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to recheck your cultural superiority complex. You can tell yourself that the Chinese don't "innovate" to help yourself feel better but that doesn't make it true. The uncomfortable truth is that state sanctioned hacking and stealing of foreign technology is a part of China's innovation. China turned its 1.4 billion citizens, that was once consider to be a burden, ie too many mouth to feed, into the world's biggest honeypot to lure in foreign corporations and siphons off their trade secrets through technology transfer. Furthermore, the communist Chinese government morphed its entire populace into a workforce for the capitalistic market, turning what was once a dirt poor agrarian nation into a economic power house. That's not innovation?
Take a look at China's high speed rail infrastructure, emerging aviation industry, military industry, space program, and tech sector. Sure, most of them were co-opted from foreign sources, but China has succeeded in incorporating them into their industrial DNA, with unmistakable "Chinese" characteristics.
China walls off foreign tech companies, nurtures its own nascent tech sector, then those tech companies IPO in foreign stock exchanges, hauling in foreign cash to further grow in their protected tech sector. That's not innovation?
That generation of older Chinese whom you derisively believe has a herd mentality, is currently trampling the world consumer markets with Chinese made products, automating their factories, and buying up real estates worldwide. Oh', and those Chinese who dare to do better than their bosses, becomes their own boss, further quickening the pace of innovation though marketplace competition.
Sure, rural Japan can be very racist. They will politely refuse you service, or simply ignore you. Unlike rural US, where American racist will simply kill or main you. That's is the difference between the rural Japanese racists and rural American racists.
Oh', it gets worst. A guy like Donald Trump, who insinuates assassination of his political opponents, openly asks his political opponents be locked up without sound legal justifications, labels the free press as the enemy of the people, is elected presidents then sends his armed Secret Service agents to the home of a prominent dissident comedian because the comedian's criticism of the president may incite people to violence. And yes, Donald Trump's base still blindly supports him and he regularly showers them with vitriolic campaign rallies.
I will never forgive the Republican party, nor will I forget the devil's bargain between the hypocrite religious conservatives and the morally bankrupt Donald Trump. I look forward to the day when Trump is removed from the White House.
However, Taiwan is a democracy with protection for basic human rights. You can freely fly the Chinese flag and openly advocate Taiwan is a part of China. Try doing the reverse in China will most likely result in imprisonment. That is the biggest difference between Taiwan and China.
Oh', that China vs China argument is a Chinese construct. The Chinese position is, if Taiwan renounces its Chinese territorial claim then that's justification for invasion; if Taiwan continues its Chinese territorial claim, that too is justification for invasion.
WTF!!!!!
We are in multiple trade wars with multiple democratic allies of ours. Allies that share our democratic ideals, share our common defense, and are not actively trying to undermine our global economic and military leadership position. Yet, we are openly helping authoritarian countries that violated our sanctions, aim their missiles at us, rams our ship and planes. Let's not kid ourselves. In authoritarian states, all large companies are organs of the state, subject to the bidding of the government. Helping companies in China is no different than helping the Chinese government itself. ZTE is a prime example.
Do evangelicals know that China actively suppressed the Christian faith and all non state-organized religion in China? Doesn't Fox News cover this topic?
Given China lackluster record in "integrating" the hearts and minds of the Hong Kong residents, who were basically tossed to the wolves by the British after 99 years of dutifully generated revenues for the British Empire. Despite some last minute electoral reforms by the British prior to the 1997 hand over to China, Hong Kong was basically a colonial subject of the Crown without a tradition of electing its own executives.
Taiwan, on the other hand, thanks to continuous US intervention since WWII, has blossomed into a fractious democracy, along with the requisite shares of protests, counter-protesters, counter-counter-protests.... and etc. Streets protest is almost a national past time, enjoyed by all demographic, from the young to the old, regardless of sexual orientation, or ethnic origin. Not to mentioned that unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has its own military.
Whether or not Taiwan's military that is being rapidly eclipsed by the Chinese military can hold its own against the Chinese is a vexing question for the island residents. However, the strategic value of loosing Taiwan to China mean loosing our pave paws radar in Taiwan, loosing our first island of defense against China and allowing China to control the sea lane that connects Japan and Korea to the half the world and their oil supply.
Taiwan also has a fairly globalized semiconductor sector. Any disruption will be felt across the world. Any damage to Taiwan's infrastructure means rapid price inflation for anything good with semiconductor inside. Fab equipment aren't usually the type people can buy in quantities immediately.
Given the rise of authoritarian China, the long term strategic and short term financial importance of a democratic Taiwan to people who enjoy free speech, especially in the digital medium, cannot be overstated.
Sadly, to our smarter-than-thou president, it's all tl;dr. He is just happy to have found his NK mini-me.
SAD . . .
Any idiot can start a war, but to win a war we need leaders with vision and teamwork. Do you see any of those traits in the current Trump administration?
As much as I love to see a vibrant domestic manufacturing sector, I don't think most American cares. We decimated our own manufacturing sector with our financial sector and tax codes favoring speculative investments in real estate and the stock market. Did the recent BIG Trump tax reform changed any of that?
I view China as an adversary to the democratic societies, and I am itching for the US to take action against the rising authoritarian capitalistic China. Yet, I am not stupid. Any war with Trump in charge will be a disaster for us. Trump's courage is defined by his Vietnam War deferments while his business acumen is defined by his four bankruptcies. Unless war is like reality television, I fear for the worst under Trump.
In the last couple decades, I've witnessed the transformation of the NRA from a firearm advocacy group into the armed wing of a very specific type of social conservatives, the Fox News social conservatives that worship Trump as their messiah. I don't know how their "Christian Values" can reconcile with their moral dexterity in accepting an serial sexual predator.
NRA has no business giving awards to a telecommunication lobbyist that has done little to advocate for firearm owners, except as a swampy favor to its new buddy Trump. This is the type of crony capitalism NRA used to nuts over during the Clinton years.
I used to enjoy reading American Rifleman but I started to question NRA's political stance during the GWB years when our Constitution was tramped by the Patriot Acts. By the Obama years, I skip all the political articles and stopped all donations. These days, I don't even bother reading the American Rifleman. The only reason I didn't cancel the subscription is because I don't feel like saving the NRA any money.
It doesn't take a genius to figure out that unchecked proliferation of high capacity magazine fed semi automatic rifles in a polarized society with limited social safety net will eventually lead to the carnage we are witnessing today. We keep this up, in a few years we'll have open street warfare between the various armed militias, all vying to protect their own interpretation our Constitution from each other.
Please don't try to justify your own racism with ignorance. The abbreviation for Japan is JPN. The Kanji character you are referring has several meaning, and most likely means "Sun" when used to refer to Japan. However, the racial slur you presented is not how it is pronounced.
They did not abbreviate their nationality down to one syllable, you did that all by your racist ignorant self.
Um, post WWII Japan after WWII, with its pacifist constitution is a protected state of the US. Japan is also a democracy. None of those is true for China. China is building up its economy and military to directly challenge the US. China believes its prefect blend of authoritarian capitalism is a superior system to our flawed democracy. A better comparison will be to compare China to pre WWII Japan.
Yup, I worry about that too. Sure, China's c919 is no where as good as a 737 or a A320, and no sane airline executive will want them. However, the Chinese government can mandate adaption by domestic Chinese airlines for domestic routes. Slowly but surely, they will improve while we sit on our collect fat ass thinking we're the best and greatest civilization under God.
It doesn't take a genius to see the incremental steps China is taking, but our politicians simply don't care enough to look beyond their next election cycle.
Aviation is just the tip of the iceberg. Wait till you start looking into how the Chinese government is actively encouraging and developing factory automation. Sadly we are too dumb to realized China is not post-war Japan/Germany. China is pre-war Japan and Germany combined.
You mean the conservative media kept mentioning the shooter is white? None of the main stream media is stressing the ethnicity of the shooter, just his name. just like they don't stress the ethnicity of the shooter had he/she been name "Abdul Fatah."
I don't understand why Ivanka is involved with this project. Sure, we need more women in STEM, but I feel that Ivanka has always been more about the superficial feel good cosmetic of sales and marketing, antithetic to unglamorous logic driven grunt work of STEM. Oh', I forgot, she is the president's daughter.
Other may disagrees, but I look at this as a $200 million dollar public funded campaign effort to groom Ivanka for the Trump dynasty.
Slowly we drift into the idiocracy. . . .
China was exploited for centuries not because of Western nations, but because of its inept authoritarian government. Let's not forget the last Dynasty in China, Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), was basically a foreign power (The Manchurians) ruling China for 200+ years. The equivalence of Mexico ruling over the US.
Kudos to the Chinese Communist Party for what? Creating a repressive fascist state where the Communist elites wreck the environment and absconded with their riches to live in Western nations, the very countries they teach their countrymen to despise.
Nation with wounded pride,
A growing economic and military power,
Zero interest in dissenting views.
Ideologically driven single party rule.
I think we've all seen that script before and it was a disaster for everyone, especially the middle class.
BTW: you'll have to actually provide evidence for this, can't just mention a bad outcome and assert bigotry.
You might be thinking about the case of Colin Kaepernick, but he was just a bad player.
He problably saw a bad future coming and decided to ahead of it by becoming a political activist, so he could play the victim card.
You mean the author of the Google memo? Programmer with poor interpersonal skills and lacks good social judgment, who decided to seek political martyrdom.
My thought exactly. Of all the news outlet available, we resort to citing RT for USAF activities. C'mon, we should be better than this . . . . We have plenty of domestic conspiracy theory news source, no need to rely on Putin's mouth piece.
It's not so funny when the government locks you up because you criticize the validity of an Xinhua article. That is the everyday reality faced by Chinese residents and that is the biggest difference between the state-run Xinhua and the state-funded BBC.
Science or not, funneling American wealth to third world countries via a non-binding agreement is enough of a reason to oppose participation in this treaty and to be glad it was never submitted to be potentially ratified.
I wish I had mod points for you. You get it. Sadly, many here do not.....
I don't think you get it either. Where have you been in the last 16h years? The Iraq War, and the still on going may be escalating Afghanistan War has cost us over $2+ Trillions and counting. You think wealth didn't transfer from the American people into the pockets of the few who profited from the never ending war?
Charity goes both ways, immediately after 9/11, we were the biggest recipient of world charity. Some countries even sent their kids off to a foreign land to help us fight our war? ...hmmm...where was Russia back then?
Please stop using the same tired straw men argument to justify isolationist views. You have no problem with wealth transfer and charity as long if they serve your own ideology.
Simplicity is good but don't forget curiosity. For shareholders, the consequence of having a self promoter con man as CEO is the possibility of loosing equity in the company. Looking at Donald Trump's past bankruptcies is a good indication of specular profits for Donald himself at the detriment of his shareholders.
Now that business man Donald Trump is the president. We, the American people are the shareholders left holding the empty bag as Donald's family profits from his latest scheme.
Simple enough.
"We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us."
China has already seen through Mr. Trump. Trump is just a paper tiger, a small hand guy in an empty ill fitted suit.
My hope is in Mr. Musk taking measures to protect his company and us from China.
Technology cuts both ways. I will sleep better at night if I know the advance killing equipments all require billions of R&D and billions more in manufacturing supply chain/infrastructure, rather than something that can be 3d printed in a cave. Of course, if you're the person in a cave with a 3d printer, this is probably an uplifting news. . . .
Sorry to break the news to you. US tax payers, like you and me, are subsidizing the packages shipped via the postal service from China :(
http://fortune.com/2015/07/03/...
One of the core reasons why US manufacturer's can't complete is that our tax policy favors gains from the speculative market, ie real estate and stock market, over the actual manufacturing of products. Another core reason is that the American consumers simply wants cheap products made in an authoritarian country that is actively competing with us militarily and economically, with the goal of becoming the dominate power in the world.
At the end, we only have ourselves to blame. We voted for the politicians who set fiscal policies that decimated our manufacturing base, and we simply like to buy cheap crap from China.
Keep this up, and China will bankrupt us in the coming arms/space race, much like how we did it to the USSR.
Putin is not interested in destroying ISIS. He is only interested in propping up his failed proxy puppet state, Assad's Syria. ISIS just happens to be one of Assad's enemies. Assad is in a mess because he chooses to torture then kill underage boys who drew unflattering graffiti of him. That's the type of person Putin is protecting in Syria.
Putin is playing chess while Trump is still player checkers. Putin is more than happy to push ISIS out of Syria and let the rest of the world, particularly the West, deal with ISIS. Actually that's probably his plan. Let ISIS attack the West and push the civil liberties in the West to the breaking point, then he can claim moral equivalency [see O'Reilly Trump interview.]
Oh', Syria's buddy, Iran, also has troops in Syria fighting "ISIS" on behalf of Assad.
Let's not forget about the 1983 Beirut bombing that killed 200+ US Marines. That suicide bombing has Syria and Iran's fingerprints all over it. 33 years later, the same type of anti-American leadership are still running Syria, Iran, and Russia. They are now our friends??? I don't think so.
The whole Middle East is one big mess. I don't like Obama's timid response, but given the tangled interests and the fact that Obama was still cleaning up after the our last great checker player, GWB, I can understand his hesitation. He can do the right thing, fight for freedom and democracy that will consume a lot of his dwindling political capital, in addition to requiring even more planning, materials and American lives, and hope the average American will understand. Or, he can be a politician and drags his feet toward doing as little as possible, which is exactly what happened.
I agree that any public figure, in any fields, needs to be held accountable for their public comments. Modonna's comment was inappropriate.
However, let's not equivocate the actions of a popular singer with worldwide following with that of a major party candidate running for the presidency of the United States, who now has the power to affect lives worldwide.
You mean like,
"By the way, and if she gets to pick --if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know. " - Aug. 9, 2016, Donald Trump
I don't believe in that BS about "left" and "right" or "liberal" and "conservatives." To me, they are often just meaningless labels applied without proper context. Meaningless sound bits meant for the mindless consumers who outsourced their thinking to the same media elites they dislike so much.
Trump has turned the White House into a reality TV set. Eerily similar to that of his shirtless horse riding buddy's own reality kleptocratic TV show.
Welcome to Amerika.