Truck drivers, one of the largest employment opportunities in the world, will be the next occupation hit as self-driving transport vehicles begin hitting the road in the next few years.
Most electronics is modular. That means you have a base unit, then you add in more RAM, more flash memory, different radio modules depending on the destination market of the phone, and so forth. And really, how much customization has there ever been in manufactured products? I can order a car from GM or Toyota with customizations, but I'm going to be limited to the upholstery styles and paint colors that the manufacturer has in stock. The same goes for an iPhone. I can order a 16gb model or a 32gb model, black or white, but if I try to order an iPhone in fluorescent green straight from Apple, I'm not going to get it.
Which goes to show you that the claims of the Trump camp that they will usher in a great renaissance in high-employment manufacturing jobs in the US is utter and complete rubbish.
You still seem to be advocating for some sort of necessity of always using these ultra-high tech solutions you refer to. I'll stand by what I said, you're using the lack of a super-duper Hollywood-level espionage technique as an excuse to try to dismiss the claim that the Russian's hacked Podesta's email.
So because the hack doesn't conform to your Hollywood notion of hacking, the claims must therefore be false? You know, it's incredible to watch a crowd of tech savvy people turn into simpering halfwits when the topic of Trump comes alone? Why in the fuck would Russia run the risk of vans parked outside DNC headquarters when they can just use a very tried-and-true social engineering hack? The effort is minimal, doesn't require that you have teams of secret agents hanging out in vans or sneaking into major telco facilities.
Indeed. I'm unsure as to why the fact that it was a script kiddy technique automatically removes it from the table of state actor espionage techniques? Social engineering, in one form or another, has been one of the most successful tools of espionage for a very long time. It's almost as if the argument is "Evil Russian supervillains would never use mere phishing."
And I don't. I frequent Bandcamp, and most of my big label purchases are to repurchase music I owned on cassette tape. Besides, the indie scene has far more interesting music. Some of the prog rock, art rock and experimental rock acts are astounding (being that this is the music I like to listen to most often). The next generation of King Crimsons and Porcupine Tree are on Bandcamp, because the big labels wouldn't touch these kinds of acts with a ten foot pole.
Russia isn't doing a bad job prodding Poland and Hungary either, which will leave the Czechs, Slovaks, and the poor Baltic states (who have suffered mightily over the centuries at the hands of Russia) looking on in horror. Christ, even Lukashenko was spooked by the seizure of Crimea and the Russian-funded civil war in Ukraine, and Belorus has long been seen as the Kremlin's most reliable ally.
But Obama couldn't simply just order US forces into Georgia or Ukraine, nor would any of its NATO partners countenanced anything that would have lead to direct hostilities, or even the remote possibility of direct hostilities with Russia. South Ossetia and Crimea, when you look at the long view, are part of a longstanding pattern of the Muscovy Princes viewing themselves as the rightful rulers and protectors of all things Russian. For a brief time after the October Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky tried to put forward a more internationalist and less Slavic model of Russian suzerainty, but after Lenin's death and Trotsky's exile, the weight of centuries of Russian history pushed it back into the Pan-Slavism.
There's no doubt that Russia, rendered impotent by economic collapse, could do little to prevent the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Balkan conflict, nor could it prevent NATO from taking the Serbs to task, and I would suggest that economic impotence is the reason why, when Russia had regained enough strength, and began trying to impose its will on Ukraine (a country and a people that it has long viewed as being a core part of the Slavic homeland), and failing that, to seize Crimea and leave the rest of Ukraine in chaos. The same goes for the seizure of South Ossetia, which sent out the message to every Russian neighbor that if they had any ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking population, Russia regarded itself as their protector, and would use whatever force it felt necessary to ensure the Kremlin's power and influence.
There was another European leader from the not so distant past who took the same position, and the results were most unpleasant.
To an extent they won, but Congress is still controlled by the traditional elements, and since the Senate is making it pretty clear that it intends to investigate Russian links to email hacks, I'd posit that this story isn't going anywhere soon, and that it is going to represent an ongoing problem for Trump that will haunt him for much of his presidency.
And how much do you want to pay for a smartphone? You act as if offshoring has no benefit for US consumers. And really, within a generation or so, all these stolen manufacturing jobs are all going to be done by machine, so even those slave wage Chinese are going to be banging on the doors of Beijing asking where their jobs went.
Both McCain and Rubio have openly condemned Russia for election interference. There is pretty strong bipartisan support in the Senate for investigating Russia and taking it to task for the hacking. I understand why Trump supporters would prefer the Russian narrative to go away, and maybe if Trump hadn't chosen Tillerson as his nominee for Secretary of State, the noise might have abated somewhat, but now that Trump has made it clear he intends to be Putin's bosom body, all Trump is doing is raising suspicions.
I don't think the Podesta leaks had anything to do with money. Assange has little use for that nowadays. This was about revenge against Clinton, who had been the Secretary of State that Assange has blamed for some time for his current condition. Whether that blame is justified or not is hard to say, but for a man to allow himself to be an instrument to destabilize the global order out of a petty vendetta tells me that Wikileaks has ceased to be any kind of champion of openness and truth, and is, as you say, a political player, but one that has no sense of responsibility or duty. Assange has basically made it an arm of the Russian government, simply because he believes Clinton ordered Sweden to arrest him.
But for every step Trump seems to be making towards reconciliation with Russia (which appears to mean weakening the US's resolve to back its European allies), he's taking equally large strides towards a cold war with China.
You may have missed this bit of news, but China has had nuclear weapons for half a century now.
Well, at least the Senate seems in general agreement. There seems to be very strong bipartisan accord that the Russians were fucking with the elections, and what this is going to do is give the Senate the political clout it needs to hold Trump in check. There have been grave misgivings about Tillerson's coming nomination for Secretary of State, and I wouldn't be surprised if he pulls out fairly quickly because he's going to have to stand before some pretty critical Senators and explain how he intends to hold Russia accountable. And waving his hands and declaring "You've got no evidence", while that may work with the Trump crowd, isn't exactly going to be much of a defense against the likes of Rubio and McCain.
So long as that military expansion is largely aimed at China, why not? Putin, I'm sure, would gladly give up the improved relations with China in exchange for a US president giving him a free hand to fuck around with Europe. Christ, this is what Russia has wanted since the Romanovs came to power.
Indeed. There is evidence of Russian involvement in recent Austrian elections. Russia has now found a new way to strike at NATO, get like-minded authoritarians into positions of power. Fortunately Austria didn't work out, but Poland and Hungary are both heading in pretty troubling directions.
Assange has always been a questionable individual, but since he holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, Wikileaks has been transformed into a sort of cult of personality. Assange made no secret of his glee at fucking up Clinton's presidential run, so when he says "Oh, no, the Russians had nothing to do with it!" it comes off as disingenuous.
There has never been a particularly easy way to deal with Russian belligerency. Napoleon's Grande Armee found itself in a frozen hell when Napoleon tried to hold Alexander I's feet to the fire for betraying him. Britain had to basically pretend the Katyn Massacre didn't happen and had to classify Finland as an Axis ally just so it could gain an ally on Germany's eastern flank. The US was forced to stand by and watch the Soviets crush the Prague Spring. The only things that have ever really worked, at least in the post-WWII era is to get Russia bound up in some sort of regional proxy disputes like Afghanistan. That is what Syria was supposed to be, I suppose, except ISIS appeared in the middle of the chaos, seized the initiative from whatever passed for legitimate anti-Assad rebels, and created a new player that ended up fucking up Iraq and buggering up relations with Turkey.
Russia certainly didn't create the Syrian situation, but it has used it to its advantage. Between Syria and fucking around with elections, a nation with a GDP smaller than Italy's, whose military has, by and large, degraded over the last two decades to regional power status, has managed to project force in a whole new way. Whether that works for Russia in the longer term is hard thing to predict, but it's pretty astounding to watch.
As to Ukraine, if NATO had rolled in there, it would have meant, in very short order, NATO and ultimately uniformed Russian troops would have been lobbing bullets at each other, and that kind of crisis could likely have escalated very quickly. I don't see how any other President would have handled the situation any differently. Neither Ford or Nixon intervened when the Soviets reimposed control over Czechoslovakia in 1968, and for the same reason Obama would not have intervened militarily in Ukraine. Ukraine is not a NATO member, it is not a EU member, and while it has had growing ties with the West, it's still not a first order ally. Couple that with the unwillingness of Europe, and Germany in particular, to wage economic war on Russia to the extent that the Obama Administration had wanted, how can you fault Obama for the more muted response?
And if you think Obama went easy on the Russians, what do you think Trump with his Secretary of State pick (presuming the Senate doesn't sink Tillerson's nomination) is going to do? Do you think he'd stand up to Russia, considering he's made his admiration for Putin pretty clear, and seems to be leaning heavily towards a Russo-American Detente, if not outright Entente?
There's strong bipartisan support in the Senate for the claims that Russia was fucking with the election. Clearly some of those who would be in the know in the Senate seem to be agreeing with the Obama Administration's assertion that Russia was involved in hacking.
Slashdot Mirror
Truck drivers, one of the largest employment opportunities in the world, will be the next occupation hit as self-driving transport vehicles begin hitting the road in the next few years.
Most electronics is modular. That means you have a base unit, then you add in more RAM, more flash memory, different radio modules depending on the destination market of the phone, and so forth. And really, how much customization has there ever been in manufactured products? I can order a car from GM or Toyota with customizations, but I'm going to be limited to the upholstery styles and paint colors that the manufacturer has in stock. The same goes for an iPhone. I can order a 16gb model or a 32gb model, black or white, but if I try to order an iPhone in fluorescent green straight from Apple, I'm not going to get it.
Which goes to show you that the claims of the Trump camp that they will usher in a great renaissance in high-employment manufacturing jobs in the US is utter and complete rubbish.
You still seem to be advocating for some sort of necessity of always using these ultra-high tech solutions you refer to. I'll stand by what I said, you're using the lack of a super-duper Hollywood-level espionage technique as an excuse to try to dismiss the claim that the Russian's hacked Podesta's email.
And now it's time to play Blame The Jew.
The incoming president has spent weeks making a fool of himself on Twitter. Trump has never needed any help in that department.
So because the hack doesn't conform to your Hollywood notion of hacking, the claims must therefore be false? You know, it's incredible to watch a crowd of tech savvy people turn into simpering halfwits when the topic of Trump comes alone? Why in the fuck would Russia run the risk of vans parked outside DNC headquarters when they can just use a very tried-and-true social engineering hack? The effort is minimal, doesn't require that you have teams of secret agents hanging out in vans or sneaking into major telco facilities.
Indeed. I'm unsure as to why the fact that it was a script kiddy technique automatically removes it from the table of state actor espionage techniques? Social engineering, in one form or another, has been one of the most successful tools of espionage for a very long time. It's almost as if the argument is "Evil Russian supervillains would never use mere phishing."
You are aware that Russians don't really sound like Bond villains, right?
And I don't. I frequent Bandcamp, and most of my big label purchases are to repurchase music I owned on cassette tape. Besides, the indie scene has far more interesting music. Some of the prog rock, art rock and experimental rock acts are astounding (being that this is the music I like to listen to most often). The next generation of King Crimsons and Porcupine Tree are on Bandcamp, because the big labels wouldn't touch these kinds of acts with a ten foot pole.
Russia isn't doing a bad job prodding Poland and Hungary either, which will leave the Czechs, Slovaks, and the poor Baltic states (who have suffered mightily over the centuries at the hands of Russia) looking on in horror. Christ, even Lukashenko was spooked by the seizure of Crimea and the Russian-funded civil war in Ukraine, and Belorus has long been seen as the Kremlin's most reliable ally.
But Obama couldn't simply just order US forces into Georgia or Ukraine, nor would any of its NATO partners countenanced anything that would have lead to direct hostilities, or even the remote possibility of direct hostilities with Russia. South Ossetia and Crimea, when you look at the long view, are part of a longstanding pattern of the Muscovy Princes viewing themselves as the rightful rulers and protectors of all things Russian. For a brief time after the October Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky tried to put forward a more internationalist and less Slavic model of Russian suzerainty, but after Lenin's death and Trotsky's exile, the weight of centuries of Russian history pushed it back into the Pan-Slavism.
There's no doubt that Russia, rendered impotent by economic collapse, could do little to prevent the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Balkan conflict, nor could it prevent NATO from taking the Serbs to task, and I would suggest that economic impotence is the reason why, when Russia had regained enough strength, and began trying to impose its will on Ukraine (a country and a people that it has long viewed as being a core part of the Slavic homeland), and failing that, to seize Crimea and leave the rest of Ukraine in chaos. The same goes for the seizure of South Ossetia, which sent out the message to every Russian neighbor that if they had any ethnic Russian or Russian-speaking population, Russia regarded itself as their protector, and would use whatever force it felt necessary to ensure the Kremlin's power and influence.
There was another European leader from the not so distant past who took the same position, and the results were most unpleasant.
That philosophy worked out pretty well in the 1930s...
To an extent they won, but Congress is still controlled by the traditional elements, and since the Senate is making it pretty clear that it intends to investigate Russian links to email hacks, I'd posit that this story isn't going anywhere soon, and that it is going to represent an ongoing problem for Trump that will haunt him for much of his presidency.
And how much do you want to pay for a smartphone? You act as if offshoring has no benefit for US consumers. And really, within a generation or so, all these stolen manufacturing jobs are all going to be done by machine, so even those slave wage Chinese are going to be banging on the doors of Beijing asking where their jobs went.
Both McCain and Rubio have openly condemned Russia for election interference. There is pretty strong bipartisan support in the Senate for investigating Russia and taking it to task for the hacking. I understand why Trump supporters would prefer the Russian narrative to go away, and maybe if Trump hadn't chosen Tillerson as his nominee for Secretary of State, the noise might have abated somewhat, but now that Trump has made it clear he intends to be Putin's bosom body, all Trump is doing is raising suspicions.
I don't think the Podesta leaks had anything to do with money. Assange has little use for that nowadays. This was about revenge against Clinton, who had been the Secretary of State that Assange has blamed for some time for his current condition. Whether that blame is justified or not is hard to say, but for a man to allow himself to be an instrument to destabilize the global order out of a petty vendetta tells me that Wikileaks has ceased to be any kind of champion of openness and truth, and is, as you say, a political player, but one that has no sense of responsibility or duty. Assange has basically made it an arm of the Russian government, simply because he believes Clinton ordered Sweden to arrest him.
But for every step Trump seems to be making towards reconciliation with Russia (which appears to mean weakening the US's resolve to back its European allies), he's taking equally large strides towards a cold war with China.
You may have missed this bit of news, but China has had nuclear weapons for half a century now.
Well, at least the Senate seems in general agreement. There seems to be very strong bipartisan accord that the Russians were fucking with the elections, and what this is going to do is give the Senate the political clout it needs to hold Trump in check. There have been grave misgivings about Tillerson's coming nomination for Secretary of State, and I wouldn't be surprised if he pulls out fairly quickly because he's going to have to stand before some pretty critical Senators and explain how he intends to hold Russia accountable. And waving his hands and declaring "You've got no evidence", while that may work with the Trump crowd, isn't exactly going to be much of a defense against the likes of Rubio and McCain.
So long as that military expansion is largely aimed at China, why not? Putin, I'm sure, would gladly give up the improved relations with China in exchange for a US president giving him a free hand to fuck around with Europe. Christ, this is what Russia has wanted since the Romanovs came to power.
Indeed. There is evidence of Russian involvement in recent Austrian elections. Russia has now found a new way to strike at NATO, get like-minded authoritarians into positions of power. Fortunately Austria didn't work out, but Poland and Hungary are both heading in pretty troubling directions.
Assange has always been a questionable individual, but since he holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, Wikileaks has been transformed into a sort of cult of personality. Assange made no secret of his glee at fucking up Clinton's presidential run, so when he says "Oh, no, the Russians had nothing to do with it!" it comes off as disingenuous.
There has never been a particularly easy way to deal with Russian belligerency. Napoleon's Grande Armee found itself in a frozen hell when Napoleon tried to hold Alexander I's feet to the fire for betraying him. Britain had to basically pretend the Katyn Massacre didn't happen and had to classify Finland as an Axis ally just so it could gain an ally on Germany's eastern flank. The US was forced to stand by and watch the Soviets crush the Prague Spring. The only things that have ever really worked, at least in the post-WWII era is to get Russia bound up in some sort of regional proxy disputes like Afghanistan. That is what Syria was supposed to be, I suppose, except ISIS appeared in the middle of the chaos, seized the initiative from whatever passed for legitimate anti-Assad rebels, and created a new player that ended up fucking up Iraq and buggering up relations with Turkey.
Russia certainly didn't create the Syrian situation, but it has used it to its advantage. Between Syria and fucking around with elections, a nation with a GDP smaller than Italy's, whose military has, by and large, degraded over the last two decades to regional power status, has managed to project force in a whole new way. Whether that works for Russia in the longer term is hard thing to predict, but it's pretty astounding to watch.
As to Ukraine, if NATO had rolled in there, it would have meant, in very short order, NATO and ultimately uniformed Russian troops would have been lobbing bullets at each other, and that kind of crisis could likely have escalated very quickly. I don't see how any other President would have handled the situation any differently. Neither Ford or Nixon intervened when the Soviets reimposed control over Czechoslovakia in 1968, and for the same reason Obama would not have intervened militarily in Ukraine. Ukraine is not a NATO member, it is not a EU member, and while it has had growing ties with the West, it's still not a first order ally. Couple that with the unwillingness of Europe, and Germany in particular, to wage economic war on Russia to the extent that the Obama Administration had wanted, how can you fault Obama for the more muted response?
And if you think Obama went easy on the Russians, what do you think Trump with his Secretary of State pick (presuming the Senate doesn't sink Tillerson's nomination) is going to do? Do you think he'd stand up to Russia, considering he's made his admiration for Putin pretty clear, and seems to be leaning heavily towards a Russo-American Detente, if not outright Entente?
And when all else fails, invoke.the No True Scotsman fallacy.
I wish the 4chan adolescents would stay over there.
There's strong bipartisan support in the Senate for the claims that Russia was fucking with the election. Clearly some of those who would be in the know in the Senate seem to be agreeing with the Obama Administration's assertion that Russia was involved in hacking.