You realise that "importing cheap labour" would not be profitable if employers paid decent minimum wages and "illegals" would never get work unless employers are happy to employ someone who can't show an ID?
And that the plain fact is that it's a lot easier to squeeze a superior work/wage ratio from people who are illegal (and thus truly desperate for their job) than from an average US-born Joe? And that illegals usually are the hardiest and most motivated segment of the population? What's not to like for an employer?
Razzing on "illegals" and "foreigners" is popular, but probably not the root cause of US wage problems.
In addition, just compare the number of jobs replaced by automation (30% of the workforce) with the number of "illegals" and "imported cheap labour" (get your estimates from reputable republican wall builders). You'll realise that imported labour can account for no more than about 5% of jobs.
Most of what Dirty Donald does is completely appalling. People write about that, it fills the Internet, so Google reflects it, as per the page-rank algorithm.
Nothing fishy or "biased" about that.It would be biased if those stories did *not* appear in the search engine.
Besides which, Dirty Donald has a long history of lashing out with accusations and conspiracy theories whenever he's pushed into a corner. As happened last week for example,
How? Well, the logical conclusion of Mr. Cohen's testimony seemed to be that Dirty Donald had personally ordered Mr. Cohen to commit a federal crime.
Combined with the conviction of Mr. Manafort olus the news that Mr. Allen Weisselberg (Dirty Donald's longtime financial man) was about to testify against him. Ouch.
That's the kind of stuff that could even get a sitting president in deep trouble. My guess is that it made Dirty Donald nervous. Very nervous.
And what does Dirty Donald do when people make him nervous? Well, he tries to divert attention from his predicament by changing the subject and he lashes out against people with all kinds of accusations. We saw him do both.
As to trying to change the subject, he suddenly started talking about a preliminary draft agreement with Mexico and desperately tried to pass of what he had achieved (a few minor adjustments to the existing NAFTA treaty) as a major win.Plus he was quite desperate to call it something other than "NAFTA-plus-a-few-minor-adjustments".Considering his base, he may well get away with that.
As to lashing out, he always picks whoever he thinks he can sufficiently muddy the water against. The media. Search engines. Institutions. Mrs. Clinton. Illegal immigrants. The Government. Anything really. As long as it resonates sufficiently with his base to provide a target for a good smear campaign. In this case that would be Google.
As regards explanations for his coverage this explanation looks much simpler than any conspiracy theory about who met whom how often three to four years ago. It's all based on known facts about Dirty Donald's behaviour. As reported in the media.
Small wonder he hates the media that consistently put his grotesque and puerile antics on display.
Does he really have any credibility left? Apart from his diehard fan-base that is?
In play? You mean the trade war against China that Dirty Donald has just kicked off?
You mean the trade war that had already begun with steel tariffs?
No, I mean the trade conflict that Dirty Donald has grown into a trade war by promising tariffs on 200 bln. worth of trade.
Business was (and is) strongly in favour of it.
"Business" is always in favor of making money, no matter the cost to somebody else or the longterm future of the nation.
You mean mainstream business ethics that has for the past century or so consistently made our firms No.1 in the world and is the cork upon which our collective prosperity floats?
You can either put in place conditions that take care of the needs of business (such as the rule of law, free trade, and fair shot at getting a level playing field), or you can sacrifice all that for a short-term BS publicity stunt trade war, and end up with a big recession in a world where the rule of law is absent and success is determined by whoever has the best collusion between state and business.
Take your pick. Oh wait... you already have. Silly of me.
Surely you understand trade issue with China is still in play? No, you do not, because you are in Denial Land.
In play? You mean the trade war against China that Dirty Donald has just kicked off? Which is probably going to cost a few thousand soy-bean farmers their farms? After a humiliating display of inane backslapping, rudderless posturing in return for "concessions" that will benefit Japan, South Korea, and Germany more than the US? You call that a success? Who's in denial here?
The devil is in the details. Signing a bad deal to try and get a better deal with China doesn't make sense.
TTP wasn't "bad" in any sense of the word. Business was (and is) strongly in favour of it. That means there's money in in. If you're afraid that US workers aren't going to benefit from that, that's a totally different problem.
Plus it was still not quite settled when Dirty Donald withdrew. It would have ensured that US norms and values governed trade in the Pacific, if not world-wide. Not Chinese ones.
And with one populist stroke of the pen Dirty Donald threw all that away. Wow, what a huuuge success, right?
And now he's (a) alienated and atagonised US allies in the Pacific by showing them that there is little advantage for them in dealing with a fickle US instead of with consistent Chinese (b) proven to them that the US is stupid enough to abandon long-term objectives in favour of chasing a limited, short-term objective, (c) driven home the fact that they had better be very polite to Chine and make sure their own long-term strategy is aligned with China's.
That's what doesn't make sense.
In the mean time Dirty Donald has adroitly manouvered the US to the sidelines so that developments in the Pacific will more or less run their course without the US being in the lead. Well, hoo-rah! Let's sell that to the fan-base, shall we?
Dirty Donald's touting a reduction in car import tariffs is an optical result only when the real issues are untouched. Reducing car tariffs somewhat is such a small result that it can only be called optical. In the mean time he has spent his powder, and this is all he got for it in return. Surely you understand that?
Those big underlying issues are something you can only change if you're able to isolate China by building trade blocks around it. Like TPP (and TTIP). And guess what? That was the first thing Dirty Donald destroyed.
Preferring instead to try his off-the-cuff macho man approach. Which yielded only optical results, embroiled the US in two major trade wars, and totally blew away any chance of isolating China. Both Putin and Xi couldn't have believed their luck.
Some people are happy to go along with his continuous fake-it-until-you-make-it approach. They're known as his Fan Base.
Other people (like me) insist on him actually earning some of the credits he doesn't tire of claiming. Anyone who does that has a claim to being fact-based and a realist. Except to his Fan Base, who knows us as "Trump Haters".
Twisting arms is something Dirty Donald might be able to do against small building contractors, but it doesn't seem to be getting him (and more importantly: the US) any results on the world stage.
Oh really?
Yes, really.
The fundamental trade issue between the US and China on is _not_ tariffs.
Instead it's China's routine use of state interference (subsidies, dumping, wholesale IP theft, espionage targeted at overseas military projects, tarif barriers, non-tarif barriers, requirements to deposit IP and source code for those wishing to open a plant in China, installation of a Chinese "partner", etc.) to ensure that China grows firms that suck in global state-of-the-art knowhow, build a local logistics chain, and as a result are globally competitive. Followed by said firms wiping the floor with overseas competitors.
Of course it all depends on your negotiation objective. If your negotiation objective is to ensure a level playing field, then Dirty Donald's antics so far have failed miserably.
If your objective is to engage in some political window-dressing (like opening up the Chinese car market a little bit so that Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi and, yes, Ford and GM too, can duke it out there) in order to sucker voters into misinterpreting the meaning of what the results achieved so far, then his antics are a thundering success of course.
So: 10/10 for political window dressing and 1/8 for actual achievement. Yup, Sounds like a certain real-estate dealer we all know.
China, the provider of North Korea's military umbrella, has fought the US to a stalemate in Korea before. And it has only gotten stronger since then. Much stronger. It has kept North Korea in the saddle militarily, politically, and economically... and there's nothing the US could have done about that.
That's a flat-out lie, because as Trump showed, the US had leverage with China that it was too afraid to use. It was Trump that succeeded in getting China to get tough on sanctions.
There, there. Don't strain yourself now. By checking up on facts for example.
(1) Take Wikipedia for example: North Korea's missile program and the start of its nuclear programme dates from 1962. Good idea to blame those failings on President Obama, but that won't wash. Except perhaps with the Trump base.
(2) Much as I'd like to hear that Dirty Donald had actually scored a major win against North Korea, I'm skeptical about the extent to which North Korea will actually, well, get rid of its nukes. I surely hope so, and if it does I'll be happy to accord Dirty Donald due credit. Only, so far it looks as if Little Rocket Man has scored a major PR win without actually doing any concessions. The phrase "Work towards de-nuclearisation" doesn't have a firm end date, does it? And it doesn't promise any actual deliverables or other concrete results does it?
It might go either way, but as I see it, an over-eager greenhorn politician just got suckered into granting a major PR coup to a dictator who has zero intention of making good on the suggestions he used as bait.
And you might also note that China hasn't given an inch on the North Korea issue before it was made to lose face when North Korea actually exploded a nuke.
I know, I know, never pester someone from the Trump base with facts... it upsets them. But here we're among grown-ups, yes?
Granted, some arm-twisting can sometimes go a long way. But only competent arm-twisting. Not the incoherent verbiage coming out of the WH now.
Funny, because here you realize Trump actually succeeded with arm-twisting, but then seek to immediately discredit it. Let's get real: Obama was a doormat when it came to foreign affairs.
Yes, very funny, because I happen to think he failed in achieving any results at all on North Korea. Like Pres. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush Jr., and Obama before him. Except for putting his face in yet another a photo op. That's why I made that remark. Twisting arms is something Dirty Donald might be able to do against small building contractors, but it doesn't seem to be getting him (and more importantly: the US) any results on the world stage.
Getting North Korea to discontinue its nuclear program was never within the capabilities of the US, short of starting WW-III. Which definitely isn't worth it.
The US have been unable to stop the Sovjets from obtaining nuclear weapons. And the Chinese. And the Indians. And the Pakistani. And Israel.
Where do people suddenly get there idea that the US could have stopped North Korea? I think they're wrong.
I can understand that people might be a bit upset about that, but there it is.
China, the provider of North Korea's military umbrella, has fought the US to a stalemate in Korea before. And it has only gotten stronger since then. Much stronger. It has kept North Korea in the saddle militarily, politically, and economically... and there's nothing the US could have done about that.
The only way North Korea will let of of its nukes is if it wants to. Dangling the view of South Korea has an appeal. Except for the one person in charge. Unfortunately Dirty Donald and his adminstration have made it abundantly clear to North Korea's dictator that he'll be signing his own death warrant if he lets go of his nukes. Do Mr. Bolton's helpful comments on Khadaffi's example ring a bell? Gods, what a fiasco.
Granted, some arm-twisting can sometimes go a long way. But only competent arm-twisting. Not the incoherent verbiage coming out of the WH now.
If there's any message that Dirty Donald is managing to convey, that's: if you're enough of a criminal (Putin, Xi, Duterte) you can be his best pal. At least he'll respect you. If you're an honest, decent type of politician then he'll squeeze you like the sucker you are until you drop dead or put up a real fight. Whichever comes first.
Let's not forget that Mr. Trump has proudly bankrupted several of the companies he ran, and his most impressive accomplishment so far has been to weather those bankruptcies wile avoiding jail time.
It's fascinating how he seems to be repeating that accomplishment with the US Inc. amidst acclaim from political flat earthers who feel disgruntled about something, hear Dirty Donald's incoherent rants, and decide well... at least it's different from the usual... let's give it a try.
The short answer seems tobe: you don't because there aren't any legal means to do that.
You're obligated to ensure your car has a legible license plate with a registration, in some states as soon as you take it on a public road. And as soon as you do that, *anyone* may photograph, capture, database-store, and database-match that number, and sell any resulting information. Nothing you can do about that under US state or federal law.
The whole purpose of the law pertaining to license plates is to make sure there are no loopholes. So that's how those laws were drawn up: to make sure there are no loopholes. Therefore, if you actually manage to find one, it will be plugged and made illegal. The interests in having set of a viable license plate regulations (law enforcement and repossession of a loan company's property) seem to outweigh any privacy concerns.
Sorry, but there it is. Cars on public roads cannot be anonymous. And if that car is registered to you personally, neither can you.
Don't like that? Start lobbying to get the law changed.
"Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around. Whatever volumes of data a machine analyzes, it cannot understand what a human gets intuitively. "
Worse, it actually seems to mean it.
Ever heard of the notion of "cargo cult"? How about the Voodoo approach to medicine? What about all the pagan "light bonfires to entice the sun to return" rites? How about all those lets-predict-the-next-doomsday-from the bible idiots.
You can't tell me that this idea that humans "intuitively understand" causal relationships versus correlations is not complete trash when there are millions of "Flat Earth" theorists about.
Good for you. I agree that the GDPR offers more protection of individuals than US laws do.
Too bad the US government is a massive pile of shit that cares more about fear mongering and big business than it does the people.
Gee thanks. Perhaps US lawmakers have been a bit reluctant to legislate the digital world to death the past 10 years? It's not all Dirty Donald's doing, ok?
And perhaps being regulation-happy means the EU must get it right once in a while? Is that worth it? Well, you decide.
And err, whatever happened to "Old World courtesy"?
We know even more about Mr. Comey. E.g. we also know that Mr. Comey is:
(4) An excellent judge of character in spotting a mob boss who gained office
(5) Someone with the moral integrity not to give a personal oath of loyalty to an "El Presidente" figure.
I wonder how long Dirty Donald will be able to continue to abuse and debase his political office and menace the world.
Personally I can't wait until Mr. Mueller subpoenas his emails and makes him eligible for the extended jail service he so tantalisingly keeps evading.
For those who still needed a reminder after all these years.
Mr. Bosworth's memo is a classic example of corporate thinking, and brilliant in its clarity and brevity.
It's a classic because it identifies certain ethical aspects of his company's conduct and then proceeds to declare all and any ethical considerations irrelevant. Ethics is placed in its proper corporate place, i.e. totally absent. The company is not malicious (there's no benefit in that) just completely a-moral.
The one and only thing that matters is what affects the company's continued economic success: growth. Growth which in turn hinges on whether a user's social circle ("friends") are on facebook.
It is the clearest and most perceptive and most succinct statement I've yet encountered (from a manager) on how the "network effect" affects companies whose business it is to provide (and sell) connections.
This memo is also valuable from another perspective.
Time and time again it's demonstrated that the question: "Am I being cynical?" is not relevant in conjunction with the corporate world. The correct question is: "Am I being cynical enough to accurately reflect reality?".
It also shows why corporate communications had better be phrased with both eyes on ways such communications expose the company or the sender to repercussions. Coming out and saying "We make money from connecting people, so that's what we will do, for good or for ill" is a bit crude. Not to say blunt. Mr. Bosworth might be due for a refresher course in proper corporate communication technique.
A more conventional phrasing of Mr. Bosworth's message is something like this: "We believe in connecting people. That's what we do and what continues to make us so successful. We will continue to serve the world in personal connectivity because we firmly believe that the good we do far outweighs any negative aspects. So for us the case is clear: we must expand our business as much as possible, as per our mission statement and the Good of Mankind."
There. Some people get that intuitively. It's part of them. Just look at Mr. Zuckerberg.
Last but not least it shows why certain things (like personal privacy) can only be achieved insofar as they are enforced by law.
Corporate self-regulation never works when corporations that don't follow self-regulation will simply outgrow and take over the ones that do. On the other hand, corporate self-regulation can work well when there is a high enough probability that the consequences of not following the rules are devastating for the rule-breaker.
Well, there is always a difficulty in deciding whether or not to do anything about someone with apparent mental health problems.
If I look at wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), I read that Mr. Cruz was mostly known for being crazy about weapons and holding extremist views on blacks and muslims. And yes, there is his comment of "Im going to be a professional school shooter" on youtube. Apparently it was too difficult to trace him based on that.
I'm totally in agreement about not selling repeater rifles to the general public. I feel you can hunt all you like with a simple bolt-action rifle, but it's a lot harder to massacre a crowd that way. At the very least I would advocate tying licenses for repeater rifles to an in-depth psychological test plus a background check (rather than the automated no-known-previous-convictions-and-no-known-history-of-drug-use checks). That view does not seem to have have majority backing though.
I'm also in favour of disallowing gun ownership for racist wingnuts and confederate flag wavers. In which I seem to be in a very small minority indeed. Understandable, I must admit, for on basis of that criterion you ought to strip tens of thousands of their firearms. Not worth the hassle, right? Apart from running into constitutional challenges.
Let's not go overboard on this one. As long as repeater rifles remain so easy to get and as long as we have loads of people with mental health issues, we will continue to face school shootings. It's just the price of doing business.Sad if it happens to you personally (or someone close to you) but it can't be avoided unless we want to take gun ownership and mental health issues seriously. So let's not pretend we care too deeply, shall we?
Oh, and shall we skip the ritual dance about "da police oughta have picked up dat nutjob long before" ? The police and the FBI have quite a lot on their plate already. From terrorism to drugs criminals to domestic violence to muggings. Their resources aren't infinite.
Republicans, in their current composition, don't like education, don't like people who aren't millionares, and don't like people to be upwardly mobile. We got it.
So, that's one less avenue to university education. The remaining ones are: (a) be frightfully good and get a full scholarship, (b) have rich parents, (c) join the army and try to qualify for a paid-for education.
Everyone else leave for Canada, the UK, or Europe. Don't worry, we'll make good the shortfall with Indians, Chinese, and Europeans in the software and engineering R&D jobs and PhD. classes.
What's scary here isn't the fact that a company would want to promote its self-interest here, but rather the mindset that it's appealing to and that might well agree with it.
Pointing fingers at The Government, or The State, is a popular argument, especially in the US, but I'm not at all convinced.
Where you talk about "concentration of power" in government's hands that goes wrong I see the sum-total of pervasive actions by individuals as the root cause, with a Government merely being set up to codify and channel the momentum caused and made inevitable by the free will and decisions of millions.
Take the issue of introducing African slaves into the West Indies now. Started, carries out, abd brought to fruition by thousands of individual traders and plantation owners.
The eradication of Indians in North America: the effect of the collective choices of millions of white US citizens over the years. Ofttimes supported by he government simply serving those it represented.
The Industrial Revolution that unfortunately led to the improverishment and marginalisation of hundreds of millions, stripping them of all perspectives and hopes of betterment, was driven by the collective choices of millions of private enterprises. Leading to what ideologues call "the proletariat", which in turn caused a century or so of bloody revolution (you mentioned the USSR, China, Pol Pot).
Those phenomena (in which "The Government" really did engineer the death of millions) were merely (as I see it) the political echoes of societal developments caused a century or so earlier by the collective actions of millions.
Therefore I think you absolutely miss the point when you finger-point at "The Government" as the perpetrator of atrocities. Sure, it forced compliance and spilled the blood, but it was never the root cause.
I think that we can dimly see today that the game-theoretic setting in which decision making takes place (the current US political situation w.r.t. the place of campaign donations, corporations being accorded rights of "individuals", lobbying and the influence of big enterprise on politics (above and beyond that of voters) is an excellent illustration.
As such I see the phenomenon of one-dollar-one-vote politics as much more of a root cause than any "government" involvement.
Indeed I think that enterprise would have made its weight felt even in an anarchy (of the type Libertarians are so fond of and keep telling us we should have). For example by throwing its weight behind some sort of warlord or crime lord capable of providing, you guessed it, Government.
It's interesting to read the comments above because most of them identify one, and only one, actor and attempt to put the entire burden of security on that actor.
End-users whose hardware is used to run a botnet should be liable say some. The manufacturers of the IoT device should secure their devices aver others. ISP's should not be allowed to just provide dumb pipes chime in some. It's a cultural issue says the paper referred to in the article.
To make things interesting, for each candidate scape-goat there are apologists. End-users are too clueless, you can't expect them to take responsibility say some. The market precludes manufacturers from putting money in (security) features nobody wants say some. ISP's shouldn't be press-ganged to play network cop say others,
All of them are both right and wrong I think. There are areas of responsibility for everyone. Just like with driving a car. Car manufacturer are responsible for providing a car with certain minimum quality and safety features.They're liable if the brakes don't work or if the turn indicators are shoddy. Dealerships that do shoddy or incompetent maintenance may face liability claims too. Road owners (municipal, county state, and federal) can all be held liable for unsafe situations if they're careless. And nothing protects individuals drivers from making mistakes or driving under influence.
So it's not a contradiction to say that every actor is liable for a subset of the risks.
The government can do a lot by adopting a law that all and any IoT devices must be capable of being secured among others against unauthorised access. No more no less. No specifics, no technicalities: the market will figure that one out. That gets the manufacturers in a position where they can afford to put minimum levels of security in because nobody is going to undercut them on that. ISP's shouldn't be saddled with police duty, but they might be obligated to detect and report port scans and widespread probes for open ports. And finally, consumers could be held liable if they install hardware that's not "approved".
It will take awhile to get that far, but it looks like a stable and sensible equilibrium. As long as people agree it's not an "either or" but an "and and" proposition.
Besides, there could well be money in it too.
What if we can come up with a legal framework for a realistic apportionment of responsibility, strike a sensible balance between cost and security, introduce an "FTC-approved IoT device" stamp and market that entire framework as a solution. I think it will find takers in the EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan at least.
Then we could start putting diplomatic pressure on "irresponsible" countries that don't have this framework in place. Ought to generate a market for "FTC-approved" gear, consultancy, and perhaps even assistance in adopting equivalent legal frameworks, no?
Of course China would rush to copy it, but they'd be copying us again (not the other way round) and lots of countries (especially those with purchasing power) might have reservations about installing a PRC-approved communications infrastructure as opposed to an FTC-approved one.
Or, because voters, after two terms of the same party, voters got itchy for a change.
Or, because the Republican party carefully hoarded its best publicity shots over its (chronically unproven) allegations of misdemeanors for the campaign and had the good luck that the FBI decided to re-re-re-examine Mrs. Clinton's emails a week or so before the election.
Or it might also be because despite good and sensible economic policies the economy doing fine but the job-market sputtered under pressure from automation and overseas competition, making people susceptible to empty rhetoric about huuuuuge improvements.
Incidentally, the economy and the job market seem to be doing Ok now without any meaningful impact of Pres. Tweety's economic policies, which seems to validate Pres. Obama's economic policies.
Or, because certain voters allowed themselves to be blinded to the current President's huge all-round incompetence by his fact-free bombastic reality-TV performance, which dovetailed nicely with their hankering after a silver bullet for all their problems.
The legal basis for all this is a recently adopted Dutch law that grants the Dutch police extremely wide powers to break into any computer system it believes is being used for criminal activities.
Once this law has been triggered, the Dutch police are basically free to use all and any computer burglary tools on the market to gain access and/or control. And once inside the system they are allowed to collect any evidence they like, and transform the system into a honeypot if they feel like it,
Note that the police doesn't actually need to _prove_ anything to anyone in order to be allowed to gain access.
Suspicion alone (I don't know how that works in The Netherlands; it might be something similar to "reasonable cause") is enough. It's only later, if and when the case goes to court, that they might have to convince the judge that they acted responsibly in having suspicions about the system they hacked, and that they didn't actually entrap people (as in entice them to commit any crimes).
If you think that sounds overly broad, I entirely agree. This being The Netherlands however, I fear that they determined this is a cost-effective way of policing and went with it on that basis.
Much as I respect prof. Hawking, I think he's making a serious mistake here.
Where he thinks that settling other planets will increase mankind's chances of survival, I believe they will lead to war. Interplanetary war that will see planets being nuked or targeted with swarms of asteroids.
There doesn't have to be a reason, we'll find one. And if we can't find one, we'll manufacture one.
A new religion. Economics. A new way of running society. Differences in life expectancy. Mutations caused by the environment. Genetic engineering leading to a superior strain of humanity.
Leave it to us. We'll find a reason. We always do.
Together on o planet we need to show some restraint, 'cause we're on the same planet. Throw that out and why not bomb a world?
Do you want to imply that vitaly challenged people should not be allowed to make themselves heard?
Dead people are already being discriminated against already on a massive scale. For example they aren't even legally allowed to own property anymore, but must work through internediaries like foundations, trust funds, banks, and lawyers. And now you want to rob them of their voice too?
That's crass vitalism, that is!
This is something we from the grassroots action group "Dead does not mean buried !" take a stand against !
Beside which, we prefer the term "differently alive", thank you very much.
It appears the authorities were warned on five (!) separate occasions about this boy being mentally unstable and embracing terrorism by people who knew him personally. They ignored it.
To be honest, they might have thought the suspect was just a buffoon. You can't go round arresting every loony you find. But what you can do is pay such people a visit (you can even use social workers for that if the police has a capacity problem) and/or interview them at the police station, have a mental assessment done, and see who they're connected with.
Well, now is the time to improve procedures instead of outlawing encryption and introducing Internet censorship..
Slashdot Mirror
You realise that "importing cheap labour" would not be profitable if employers paid decent minimum wages and "illegals" would never get work unless employers are happy to employ someone who can't show an ID?
And that the plain fact is that it's a lot easier to squeeze a superior work/wage ratio from people who are illegal (and thus truly desperate for their job) than from an average US-born Joe? And that illegals usually are the hardiest and most motivated segment of the population? What's not to like for an employer?
Razzing on "illegals" and "foreigners" is popular, but probably not the root cause of US wage problems.
In addition, just compare the number of jobs replaced by automation (30% of the workforce) with the number of "illegals" and "imported cheap labour" (get your estimates from reputable republican wall builders). You'll realise that imported labour can account for no more than about 5% of jobs.
Nothing fishy or "biased" about that.It would be biased if those stories did *not* appear in the search engine.
Besides which, Dirty Donald has a long history of lashing out with accusations and conspiracy theories whenever he's pushed into a corner. As happened last week for example,
How? Well, the logical conclusion of Mr. Cohen's testimony seemed to be that Dirty Donald had personally ordered Mr. Cohen to commit a federal crime.
Combined with the conviction of Mr. Manafort olus the news that Mr. Allen Weisselberg (Dirty Donald's longtime financial man) was about to testify against him. Ouch.
That's the kind of stuff that could even get a sitting president in deep trouble. My guess is that it made Dirty Donald nervous. Very nervous.
And what does Dirty Donald do when people make him nervous? Well, he tries to divert attention from his predicament by changing the subject and he lashes out against people with all kinds of accusations. We saw him do both.
As to trying to change the subject, he suddenly started talking about a preliminary draft agreement with Mexico and desperately tried to pass of what he had achieved (a few minor adjustments to the existing NAFTA treaty) as a major win.Plus he was quite desperate to call it something other than "NAFTA-plus-a-few-minor-adjustments".Considering his base, he may well get away with that.
As to lashing out, he always picks whoever he thinks he can sufficiently muddy the water against. The media. Search engines. Institutions. Mrs. Clinton. Illegal immigrants. The Government. Anything really. As long as it resonates sufficiently with his base to provide a target for a good smear campaign. In this case that would be Google.
As regards explanations for his coverage this explanation looks much simpler than any conspiracy theory about who met whom how often three to four years ago. It's all based on known facts about Dirty Donald's behaviour. As reported in the media.
Small wonder he hates the media that consistently put his grotesque and puerile antics on display.
Does he really have any credibility left? Apart from his diehard fan-base that is?
No, I mean the trade conflict that Dirty Donald has grown into a trade war by promising tariffs on 200 bln. worth of trade.
You mean mainstream business ethics that has for the past century or so consistently made our firms No.1 in the world and is the cork upon which our collective prosperity floats?
You can either put in place conditions that take care of the needs of business (such as the rule of law, free trade, and fair shot at getting a level playing field), or you can sacrifice all that for a short-term BS publicity stunt trade war, and end up with a big recession in a world where the rule of law is absent and success is determined by whoever has the best collusion between state and business.
Take your pick. Oh wait ... you already have. Silly of me.
In play? You mean the trade war against China that Dirty Donald has just kicked off? Which is probably going to cost a few thousand soy-bean farmers their farms? After a humiliating display of inane backslapping, rudderless posturing in return for "concessions" that will benefit Japan, South Korea, and Germany more than the US? You call that a success? Who's in denial here?
TTP wasn't "bad" in any sense of the word. Business was (and is) strongly in favour of it. That means there's money in in. If you're afraid that US workers aren't going to benefit from that, that's a totally different problem.
Plus it was still not quite settled when Dirty Donald withdrew. It would have ensured that US norms and values governed trade in the Pacific, if not world-wide. Not Chinese ones. And with one populist stroke of the pen Dirty Donald threw all that away. Wow, what a huuuge success, right?
And now he's (a) alienated and atagonised US allies in the Pacific by showing them that there is little advantage for them in dealing with a fickle US instead of with consistent Chinese (b) proven to them that the US is stupid enough to abandon long-term objectives in favour of chasing a limited, short-term objective, (c) driven home the fact that they had better be very polite to Chine and make sure their own long-term strategy is aligned with China's.
That's what doesn't make sense.
In the mean time Dirty Donald has adroitly manouvered the US to the sidelines so that developments in the Pacific will more or less run their course without the US being in the lead. Well, hoo-rah! Let's sell that to the fan-base, shall we?
Those big underlying issues are something you can only change if you're able to isolate China by building trade blocks around it. Like TPP (and TTIP). And guess what? That was the first thing Dirty Donald destroyed.
Preferring instead to try his off-the-cuff macho man approach. Which yielded only optical results, embroiled the US in two major trade wars, and totally blew away any chance of isolating China. Both Putin and Xi couldn't have believed their luck.
Some people are happy to go along with his continuous fake-it-until-you-make-it approach. They're known as his Fan Base.
Other people (like me) insist on him actually earning some of the credits he doesn't tire of claiming. Anyone who does that has a claim to being fact-based and a realist. Except to his Fan Base, who knows us as "Trump Haters".
Yes, really.
The fundamental trade issue between the US and China on is _not_ tariffs.
Instead it's China's routine use of state interference (subsidies, dumping, wholesale IP theft, espionage targeted at overseas military projects, tarif barriers, non-tarif barriers, requirements to deposit IP and source code for those wishing to open a plant in China, installation of a Chinese "partner", etc.) to ensure that China grows firms that suck in global state-of-the-art knowhow, build a local logistics chain, and as a result are globally competitive. Followed by said firms wiping the floor with overseas competitors.
See e.g. here: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/0...
Of course it all depends on your negotiation objective. If your negotiation objective is to ensure a level playing field, then Dirty Donald's antics so far have failed miserably.
If your objective is to engage in some political window-dressing (like opening up the Chinese car market a little bit so that Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi and, yes, Ford and GM too, can duke it out there) in order to sucker voters into misinterpreting the meaning of what the results achieved so far, then his antics are a thundering success of course.
So: 10/10 for political window dressing and 1/8 for actual achievement. Yup, Sounds like a certain real-estate dealer we all know.
There, there. Don't strain yourself now. By checking up on facts for example.
(1) Take Wikipedia for example: North Korea's missile program and the start of its nuclear programme dates from 1962. Good idea to blame those failings on President Obama, but that won't wash. Except perhaps with the Trump base.
(2) Much as I'd like to hear that Dirty Donald had actually scored a major win against North Korea, I'm skeptical about the extent to which North Korea will actually, well, get rid of its nukes. I surely hope so, and if it does I'll be happy to accord Dirty Donald due credit. Only, so far it looks as if Little Rocket Man has scored a major PR win without actually doing any concessions. The phrase "Work towards de-nuclearisation" doesn't have a firm end date, does it? And it doesn't promise any actual deliverables or other concrete results does it?
It might go either way, but as I see it, an over-eager greenhorn politician just got suckered into granting a major PR coup to a dictator who has zero intention of making good on the suggestions he used as bait.
And you might also note that China hasn't given an inch on the North Korea issue before it was made to lose face when North Korea actually exploded a nuke.
I know, I know, never pester someone from the Trump base with facts ... it upsets them. But here we're among grown-ups, yes?
Yes, very funny, because I happen to think he failed in achieving any results at all on North Korea. Like Pres. Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush Jr., and Obama before him. Except for putting his face in yet another a photo op. That's why I made that remark. Twisting arms is something Dirty Donald might be able to do against small building contractors, but it doesn't seem to be getting him (and more importantly: the US) any results on the world stage.
The US have been unable to stop the Sovjets from obtaining nuclear weapons. And the Chinese. And the Indians. And the Pakistani. And Israel.
Where do people suddenly get there idea that the US could have stopped North Korea? I think they're wrong.
I can understand that people might be a bit upset about that, but there it is.
China, the provider of North Korea's military umbrella, has fought the US to a stalemate in Korea before. And it has only gotten stronger since then. Much stronger. It has kept North Korea in the saddle militarily, politically, and economically ... and there's nothing the US could have done about that.
The only way North Korea will let of of its nukes is if it wants to. Dangling the view of South Korea has an appeal. Except for the one person in charge. Unfortunately Dirty Donald and his adminstration have made it abundantly clear to North Korea's dictator that he'll be signing his own death warrant if he lets go of his nukes. Do Mr. Bolton's helpful comments on Khadaffi's example ring a bell? Gods, what a fiasco.
Granted, some arm-twisting can sometimes go a long way. But only competent arm-twisting. Not the incoherent verbiage coming out of the WH now.
If there's any message that Dirty Donald is managing to convey, that's: if you're enough of a criminal (Putin, Xi, Duterte) you can be his best pal. At least he'll respect you. If you're an honest, decent type of politician then he'll squeeze you like the sucker you are until you drop dead or put up a real fight. Whichever comes first.
Let's not forget that Mr. Trump has proudly bankrupted several of the companies he ran, and his most impressive accomplishment so far has been to weather those bankruptcies wile avoiding jail time.
It's fascinating how he seems to be repeating that accomplishment with the US Inc. amidst acclaim from political flat earthers who feel disgruntled about something, hear Dirty Donald's incoherent rants, and decide well ... at least it's different from the usual ... let's give it a try.
Might still happen though, if the manufacturers keep up the shoddy security we've come to expect from them.
You're obligated to ensure your car has a legible license plate with a registration, in some states as soon as you take it on a public road. And as soon as you do that, *anyone* may photograph, capture, database-store, and database-match that number, and sell any resulting information. Nothing you can do about that under US state or federal law.
The whole purpose of the law pertaining to license plates is to make sure there are no loopholes. So that's how those laws were drawn up: to make sure there are no loopholes. Therefore, if you actually manage to find one, it will be plugged and made illegal. The interests in having set of a viable license plate regulations (law enforcement and repossession of a loan company's property) seem to outweigh any privacy concerns.
Sorry, but there it is. Cars on public roads cannot be anonymous. And if that car is registered to you personally, neither can you.
Don't like that? Start lobbying to get the law changed.
"Put simply, today's machine-learning programs can't tell whether a crowing rooster makes the sun rise, or the other way around. Whatever volumes of data a machine analyzes, it cannot understand what a human gets intuitively. "
Worse, it actually seems to mean it.
Ever heard of the notion of "cargo cult"? How about the Voodoo approach to medicine? What about all the pagan "light bonfires to entice the sun to return" rites? How about all those lets-predict-the-next-doomsday-from the bible idiots.
You can't tell me that this idea that humans "intuitively understand" causal relationships versus correlations is not complete trash when there are millions of "Flat Earth" theorists about.
But laws like GDPR do. Glad I live in Europe.
Good for you. I agree that the GDPR offers more protection of individuals than US laws do.
Too bad the US government is a massive pile of shit that cares more about fear mongering and big business than it does the people.
Gee thanks. Perhaps US lawmakers have been a bit reluctant to legislate the digital world to death the past 10 years? It's not all Dirty Donald's doing, ok? And perhaps being regulation-happy means the EU must get it right once in a while? Is that worth it? Well, you decide.
And err, whatever happened to "Old World courtesy"?
(4) An excellent judge of character in spotting a mob boss who gained office
(5) Someone with the moral integrity not to give a personal oath of loyalty to an "El Presidente" figure.
I wonder how long Dirty Donald will be able to continue to abuse and debase his political office and menace the world. Personally I can't wait until Mr. Mueller subpoenas his emails and makes him eligible for the extended jail service he so tantalisingly keeps evading.
Mr. Bosworth's memo is a classic example of corporate thinking, and brilliant in its clarity and brevity.
It's a classic because it identifies certain ethical aspects of his company's conduct and then proceeds to declare all and any ethical considerations irrelevant. Ethics is placed in its proper corporate place, i.e. totally absent. The company is not malicious (there's no benefit in that) just completely a-moral.
The one and only thing that matters is what affects the company's continued economic success: growth. Growth which in turn hinges on whether a user's social circle ("friends") are on facebook. It is the clearest and most perceptive and most succinct statement I've yet encountered (from a manager) on how the "network effect" affects companies whose business it is to provide (and sell) connections.
This memo is also valuable from another perspective. Time and time again it's demonstrated that the question: "Am I being cynical?" is not relevant in conjunction with the corporate world. The correct question is: "Am I being cynical enough to accurately reflect reality?".
It also shows why corporate communications had better be phrased with both eyes on ways such communications expose the company or the sender to repercussions. Coming out and saying "We make money from connecting people, so that's what we will do, for good or for ill" is a bit crude. Not to say blunt. Mr. Bosworth might be due for a refresher course in proper corporate communication technique.
A more conventional phrasing of Mr. Bosworth's message is something like this: "We believe in connecting people. That's what we do and what continues to make us so successful. We will continue to serve the world in personal connectivity because we firmly believe that the good we do far outweighs any negative aspects. So for us the case is clear: we must expand our business as much as possible, as per our mission statement and the Good of Mankind."
There. Some people get that intuitively. It's part of them. Just look at Mr. Zuckerberg.
Last but not least it shows why certain things (like personal privacy) can only be achieved insofar as they are enforced by law.
Corporate self-regulation never works when corporations that don't follow self-regulation will simply outgrow and take over the ones that do. On the other hand, corporate self-regulation can work well when there is a high enough probability that the consequences of not following the rules are devastating for the rule-breaker.
If I look at wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ), I read that Mr. Cruz was mostly known for being crazy about weapons and holding extremist views on blacks and muslims. And yes, there is his comment of "Im going to be a professional school shooter" on youtube. Apparently it was too difficult to trace him based on that.
I'm totally in agreement about not selling repeater rifles to the general public. I feel you can hunt all you like with a simple bolt-action rifle, but it's a lot harder to massacre a crowd that way. At the very least I would advocate tying licenses for repeater rifles to an in-depth psychological test plus a background check (rather than the automated no-known-previous-convictions-and-no-known-history-of-drug-use checks). That view does not seem to have have majority backing though.
I'm also in favour of disallowing gun ownership for racist wingnuts and confederate flag wavers. In which I seem to be in a very small minority indeed. Understandable, I must admit, for on basis of that criterion you ought to strip tens of thousands of their firearms. Not worth the hassle, right? Apart from running into constitutional challenges.
Let's not go overboard on this one. As long as repeater rifles remain so easy to get and as long as we have loads of people with mental health issues, we will continue to face school shootings. It's just the price of doing business.Sad if it happens to you personally (or someone close to you) but it can't be avoided unless we want to take gun ownership and mental health issues seriously. So let's not pretend we care too deeply, shall we?
Oh, and shall we skip the ritual dance about "da police oughta have picked up dat nutjob long before" ? The police and the FBI have quite a lot on their plate already. From terrorism to drugs criminals to domestic violence to muggings. Their resources aren't infinite.
Republicans, in their current composition, don't like education, don't like people who aren't millionares, and don't like people to be upwardly mobile. We got it.
So, that's one less avenue to university education. The remaining ones are: (a) be frightfully good and get a full scholarship, (b) have rich parents, (c) join the army and try to qualify for a paid-for education.
Everyone else leave for Canada, the UK, or Europe. Don't worry, we'll make good the shortfall with Indians, Chinese, and Europeans in the software and engineering R&D jobs and PhD. classes.
What's scary here isn't the fact that a company would want to promote its self-interest here, but rather the mindset that it's appealing to and that might well agree with it.
Pointing fingers at The Government, or The State, is a popular argument, especially in the US, but I'm not at all convinced.
Where you talk about "concentration of power" in government's hands that goes wrong I see the sum-total of pervasive actions by individuals as the root cause, with a Government merely being set up to codify and channel the momentum caused and made inevitable by the free will and decisions of millions.
Take the issue of introducing African slaves into the West Indies now. Started, carries out, abd brought to fruition by thousands of individual traders and plantation owners.
The eradication of Indians in North America: the effect of the collective choices of millions of white US citizens over the years. Ofttimes supported by he government simply serving those it represented.
The Industrial Revolution that unfortunately led to the improverishment and marginalisation of hundreds of millions, stripping them of all perspectives and hopes of betterment, was driven by the collective choices of millions of private enterprises. Leading to what ideologues call "the proletariat", which in turn caused a century or so of bloody revolution (you mentioned the USSR, China, Pol Pot).
Those phenomena (in which "The Government" really did engineer the death of millions) were merely (as I see it) the political echoes of societal developments caused a century or so earlier by the collective actions of millions.
Therefore I think you absolutely miss the point when you finger-point at "The Government" as the perpetrator of atrocities. Sure, it forced compliance and spilled the blood, but it was never the root cause.
I think that we can dimly see today that the game-theoretic setting in which decision making takes place (the current US political situation w.r.t. the place of campaign donations, corporations being accorded rights of "individuals", lobbying and the influence of big enterprise on politics (above and beyond that of voters) is an excellent illustration.
As such I see the phenomenon of one-dollar-one-vote politics as much more of a root cause than any "government" involvement.
Indeed I think that enterprise would have made its weight felt even in an anarchy (of the type Libertarians are so fond of and keep telling us we should have). For example by throwing its weight behind some sort of warlord or crime lord capable of providing, you guessed it, Government.
End-users whose hardware is used to run a botnet should be liable say some. The manufacturers of the IoT device should secure their devices aver others. ISP's should not be allowed to just provide dumb pipes chime in some. It's a cultural issue says the paper referred to in the article.
To make things interesting, for each candidate scape-goat there are apologists. End-users are too clueless, you can't expect them to take responsibility say some. The market precludes manufacturers from putting money in (security) features nobody wants say some. ISP's shouldn't be press-ganged to play network cop say others,
All of them are both right and wrong I think. There are areas of responsibility for everyone. Just like with driving a car. Car manufacturer are responsible for providing a car with certain minimum quality and safety features.They're liable if the brakes don't work or if the turn indicators are shoddy. Dealerships that do shoddy or incompetent maintenance may face liability claims too. Road owners (municipal, county state, and federal) can all be held liable for unsafe situations if they're careless. And nothing protects individuals drivers from making mistakes or driving under influence.
So it's not a contradiction to say that every actor is liable for a subset of the risks.
The government can do a lot by adopting a law that all and any IoT devices must be capable of being secured among others against unauthorised access. No more no less. No specifics, no technicalities: the market will figure that one out. That gets the manufacturers in a position where they can afford to put minimum levels of security in because nobody is going to undercut them on that. ISP's shouldn't be saddled with police duty, but they might be obligated to detect and report port scans and widespread probes for open ports. And finally, consumers could be held liable if they install hardware that's not "approved".
It will take awhile to get that far, but it looks like a stable and sensible equilibrium. As long as people agree it's not an "either or" but an "and and" proposition.
Besides, there could well be money in it too.
What if we can come up with a legal framework for a realistic apportionment of responsibility, strike a sensible balance between cost and security, introduce an "FTC-approved IoT device" stamp and market that entire framework as a solution. I think it will find takers in the EU, Japan, Korea, Taiwan at least.
Then we could start putting diplomatic pressure on "irresponsible" countries that don't have this framework in place. Ought to generate a market for "FTC-approved" gear, consultancy, and perhaps even assistance in adopting equivalent legal frameworks, no?
Of course China would rush to copy it, but they'd be copying us again (not the other way round) and lots of countries (especially those with purchasing power) might have reservations about installing a PRC-approved communications infrastructure as opposed to an FTC-approved one.
Or, because the Republican party carefully hoarded its best publicity shots over its (chronically unproven) allegations of misdemeanors for the campaign and had the good luck that the FBI decided to re-re-re-examine Mrs. Clinton's emails a week or so before the election.
Or it might also be because despite good and sensible economic policies the economy doing fine but the job-market sputtered under pressure from automation and overseas competition, making people susceptible to empty rhetoric about huuuuuge improvements.
Incidentally, the economy and the job market seem to be doing Ok now without any meaningful impact of Pres. Tweety's economic policies, which seems to validate Pres. Obama's economic policies.
Or, because certain voters allowed themselves to be blinded to the current President's huge all-round incompetence by his fact-free bombastic reality-TV performance, which dovetailed nicely with their hankering after a silver bullet for all their problems.
Come to think of it, mobile internet access is adequate for Twitter. And that's all anyone should need, right? Case closed.
Once this law has been triggered, the Dutch police are basically free to use all and any computer burglary tools on the market to gain access and/or control. And once inside the system they are allowed to collect any evidence they like, and transform the system into a honeypot if they feel like it,
Note that the police doesn't actually need to _prove_ anything to anyone in order to be allowed to gain access.
Suspicion alone (I don't know how that works in The Netherlands; it might be something similar to "reasonable cause") is enough. It's only later, if and when the case goes to court, that they might have to convince the judge that they acted responsibly in having suspicions about the system they hacked, and that they didn't actually entrap people (as in entice them to commit any crimes).
If you think that sounds overly broad, I entirely agree. This being The Netherlands however, I fear that they determined this is a cost-effective way of policing and went with it on that basis.
Where he thinks that settling other planets will increase mankind's chances of survival, I believe they will lead to war. Interplanetary war that will see planets being nuked or targeted with swarms of asteroids.
There doesn't have to be a reason, we'll find one. And if we can't find one, we'll manufacture one.
A new religion. Economics. A new way of running society. Differences in life expectancy. Mutations caused by the environment. Genetic engineering leading to a superior strain of humanity.
Leave it to us. We'll find a reason. We always do. Together on o planet we need to show some restraint, 'cause we're on the same planet. Throw that out and why not bomb a world?
Dead people are already being discriminated against already on a massive scale. For example they aren't even legally allowed to own property anymore, but must work through internediaries like foundations, trust funds, banks, and lawyers. And now you want to rob them of their voice too?
That's crass vitalism, that is!
This is something we from the grassroots action group "Dead does not mean buried !" take a stand against !
Beside which, we prefer the term "differently alive", thank you very much.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
It appears the authorities were warned on five (!) separate occasions about this boy being mentally unstable and embracing terrorism by people who knew him personally. They ignored it.
To be honest, they might have thought the suspect was just a buffoon. You can't go round arresting every loony you find. But what you can do is pay such people a visit (you can even use social workers for that if the police has a capacity problem) and/or interview them at the police station, have a mental assessment done, and see who they're connected with.
Well, now is the time to improve procedures instead of outlawing encryption and introducing Internet censorship..