Tory back benchers have a lot to answer for. Screwed up Major's government over Europe, forced Cameron into that disastrous, career-ending referendum and have now done the same to May. Not to mention the effect on the country.
I'm an American and I don't claim to be an expert on British politics, but I do in general try to keep up with the goings on in Europe so let's just call me a smart layman and definitely more knowledgeable on Europe in general than most Americans.
I see it differently from you as I'm an outside observer. I think Cameron's problem was pure hubris. After barely dodging a failure on the Scottish independence vote, I think he became convinced that he could put anything up to a vote and he would never lose. Rationally he should have concluded from the Scottish independence vote that he barely dodged a bullet there and it would be in his best interests to not put himself in that kind of situation again, but instead he bet everything he owned on a Brexit referendum that he believed he couldn't lose because he was invincible. Perhaps the "Troy back benchers" as you called them were pretty happy with things that have happened, but I think Cameron was the master of his own fate here a lot more than him giving in to what they wanted.
I've seen two big bubbles in my life in the USA come crashing down - the internet bubble of the 1990s and the previous decade's housing bubble. Here are the signs of a bubble.
1) Prices keep going up even though intelligent people (Slashdotters, for example) can't see any real justification for it.
2) People who don't know anything about the subject come to the conclusion that it will last forever and can't ever lose money.
3) People believe it can't ever go down and start investing in it as a retirement strategy.
4) Stupid people start getting into it. No offense, but when your waitress decides that cryptocurrency is going to be her ticket to becoming wealthy, it's time to get out of it.
5) People start finding high risk ways to put money they don't have into it because they believe that as the price will only go up, they'll soon turn enough profits to pay back the high risk loans they got. Examples would be buying stock on margin and subprime home loans.
6) Big money banks/investment firms in the USA find new ways to invest in it that nobody understands.
Imagine if we had this kind of wall-to-wall negative coverage of Obama
I have no problem imagining it, I witnessed it. According to Fox News and every conservative media outlet he was the worst president in history and every single thing he did was the worst and most awful thing ever including things like trying to improve nutrition in schools.
I've got conservative friends who back up what you're saying. I've heard the "Obama was the worst president in history" line more times than I care to count. They all watch Fox News by the way. I pressed one for details and basically it turned out he was just repeating what Sean Hannity said without any specifics. The other one admitted to me that he personally benefited from Obamacare and it really did lower his insurance costs (he owns a small business) but can't really point to anything specific either other than the idea that Obama "apologized for everything" and relations with all of our allies went to hell under Obama. Of course that's not really true, but people still think it.
I do actually care about automobile design and I like the looks of the Tesla, Bolt and Leaf. I had a Leaf for 3 years. I'm somewhat fussy about car looks and it satisfied me. Nissan has a proposed re-design of the Leaf that I think is amazing looking, but nobody knows if it will ever see the light of day. You should be able to find it by searching for "Nissan Leaf next generation" (without the quote marks) but again, taste is subjective so I'd venture a guess that you're not going to like that one either. Personally I think the i3 is "crap on a stick" as a friend would say, so I doubt that you're ever going to see an electric car that meets your unique styling requirements in the next 10 years.
Two words - Internet bubble.
One word - Lucent.
Bell Labs and innovation died because AT&T spun off Lucent in the internet bubble days and put Bell Labs in it. I went to Murray Hill maybe a couple of years before Lucent existed and it still had really smart people there who were interested in doing cool things. Lucent didn't really know what it was doing and it basically killed Bell Labs through incompetence. Lucent doesn't really exist any more. It's passed through 2 more owners and now is some part of Nokia. I was in an investment club during the Internet bubble and I remember we bought Lucent stock and we kept getting stock in spin off companies as Lucent tried desperately to spin off the crap parts of its business, like old school analog phone service, to save the high tech part of it, but nothing they did worked.
I guess it depends how long it takes for Trump to get impeached or otherwise unpresidented through a failed re-election. There is a reason the Trump administration is leaking like an open pipe (a sieve is not leaky enough for this metaphor). The distrust for this man goes beyond mere partisanship, and countless people are risking prison time to try to undo arguably the worst mistake in recent American history.
I still think Trump right now has a greater than 50% chance of getting re-elected and I'll further predict that he won't be impeached. Here's why.
1) Short term demographics favor him and the Republican Party. The people that elected him are very likely in 4 years to still have the numbers to put him back in office. The Democrats will eventually get the majority of voters behind them, but right now too many blacks and young people aren't voting at all, and as both groups skew heavily Democratic, this hurts the Democrats badly.
2) Since 1900, incumbent presidents have almost always won re-election. The few who didn't were presidents in times of great economic distress. Even hugely unpopular presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama won re-election. Think about that.
3) Trump isn't going to get impeached. There's no evidence that he has done anything to warrant that. And we don't want go down that path of "I'm going to impeach the president if he's with the other party every time my party gains control of Congress".
4) The Democrats seem unlikely to me to take the Senate in 2018 given how most of the seats up for election are held by them. Right now I'm guessing that holding 49 seats is probably a best case outcome.
5) As they've got even more ground to make up in the House, they're also unlikely to regain control there. The House is always going to be much harder to take than the Senate.
6) If they somehow do gain control of one or both houses of Congress, Trump will simply blame everything on the Democrats and Republican voters will buy it.
7) I've got lots of conservative friends and their attitudes towards Trump range from absolutely giddy that he won (still) to, at worst, slightly disappointed in a few things. And I'm not sure that if this very ill conceived replacement of Obamacare passes and harms tens of millions of people that it will make any difference in the votes.
8) He may yet do some things that elevate his standing with the voters in general. Solving the North Korea problem permanently in a way that doesn't end up killing millions of people would be one way to do it.
Honestly I wish Twitter would just die and not be replaced with anything like it. I think society would be much better off in the long run and the media on the internet would stop acting like the opinions of nobodies who live in their parents' basements were crucially important. But on to the point at hand.
There's nothing in this plan to stop institutional investors from buying up large numbers of shares and effectively gaining control and doing exactly what the proposers are trying to stop. It's hard to get people to pay for something they get for free and I just don't see users of Twitter being willing to pay to save it. There are 725 million or so shares of Twitter stock available. That requires an awful large number of people to buy 2 or 3 shares each. That's an unrealistic goal.
Also as old as movie critics is studios blaming movie critics for their shitty movies bombing. It's a tired complaint. Anyone who seriously thought a Baywatch reboot or yet another Johnny Depp pirate film were going to be smash hits ought to be forced into early retirement.
Disagree strongly. I haven't seen Baywatch but I was pretty shocked that it came out as an R-rated comedy. That does reduce its audience somewhat. And I have to ask - if you HAD to make it a comedy to get the movie made, should the move have been made at all?
Pirates is a different story. USA Today loved it. And it was easily the box office champ over Memorial Day weekend. It has a 7.1 rating on IMDB, which is quite good. Here's the problem. It was really expensive to make. And even with leading the box office over Memorial Day weekend, and it did like double the business of film #2 which is Guardians Of The Galaxy 2, it didn't bring in enough to give Disney confidence it will turn a profit. I'd like to see Pirates 5 but haven't had time yet (was out of town over the weekend). And Alien:Covenant, which is another film I'd like to see, looks like it may barely break even despite good ratings from customers. Attendance is down at movie theaters right now. Everything that comes out is going to be lower than hoped for. Remember I said it first - Wonder Woman is likely to be underwhelming too where it doesn't make anywhere close to what it's studio is hoping for.
So, do you think she will run roughshod over the DNC to run again in 2020?
No way, for a variety of reasons.
1) I can't imagine the superdelegates actually believe she remains the best option for 2020.
2) The DNC seems hell bent right now on making sure that people, mostly women, as divisive as Hillary remain the main decision makers going forward. If another presidential primary was coming up this year, Elizabeth Warren would be the front runner. And she has a great chance to be another Mondale and McGovern in a general election.
3) The email server stuff would start up all over again by somebody and overshadow everything - again.
4) The last time the Democrats tried the "nominate the same person who lost last time" trick, it didn't work so well. See 1956.
5) Hard to believe the majority of people who voted for Hillary wouldn't strongly prefer another candidate in the 2020 primaries if for no other reason than she lost to a truly terrible opposing candidate.
6) Her health is not great and I had doubts that even if she won that she'd be able to run for re-election. It's not getting better. She is on really powerful blood thinners with huge drawbacks that to me indicate that she has very large underlying health issues, much much more serious than is generally realized by the public. Let's just say that Donald Trump has a much higher chance of having the health needed to be president in 2020 than Hillary does.
I certainly hope Europe is able to take the mantle of leader of the free world while the US gets its act back together. I am a proud American, but I'm a human first. My country is the second largest polluter in the world, and the largest per capita. I hope more sensible countries around the world band together to show the more ignorant members of my country we cannot get away with it forever. Tariffs or sanctions against the U.S. for its inaction would be a good start.
List of the top 5 polluters by CO2 emissions:
1) China
2) USA
3) European Union
4) India
5) Russia
Here's your real problem. Note that 3 of the so-called BRICS nations are number 1, 4 and 5 on that list. Of those 3 nations on the list, only China really cares any about the environment and even then it's not much. None of them are ever going to really reduce their emissions if there is any chance it could hurt economic development. Even if the US did play along, China, India, Russia and others won't. They'll give lip service to the agreement, but they'll never actually implement enough to make a big difference.
I use CNN for convenience (easy to type) but the BBC is pretty good too. Then again I don't live in the UK, so UK people may have a different opinion of it.
My best friend honestly believes that Fox News is the only news source that is, as they claim, "fair and balanced". He's pretty conservative and he bases this on the idea that they have like one commentator who is liberal and 2 or 3 who aren't crazy wing nuts. He thinks CNN is as about as far left as it gets. His head would explode if he knew the kind of stuff that MSNBC has, which makes CNN almost look conservative. I admit to being disappointed in CNN since Trump became president. Their fact checking is way down and they have a rather large number of online columns from a guy who truly hates Trump. So much for them being objective any more. But at least they do cover stuff that isn't positive about Trump whereas Fox News pretends that anything negative never happened. At any random time compare the headlines online between the two and the difference in what each thinks is important is rather surprising.
I have another friend who more than 20 years ago immigrated from the USSR with his parents to the USA and his mother gets all her news from notorious propaganda source RT. She believes everything they say. She panicked him by calling him and telling him that there was a nuclear bomb dropped in Ukraine because RT said so. Yeah. I had to calm him down by telling him that no other news source reported that. But he's a real momma's boy and she calls him multiple times a day and is always filling his head with some nonsense she sees on RT and neither him nor her will ever stop believing it. People are just going to believe what they want to if it meets their pre-conceptions.
I have worked for roughly a handful of different companies in my IT career and vacation benefits were all over the map. I worked for the federal government once and we got a ton of vacation time. I really liked that and used it, but I remember having two older co-workers who would basically never take a day off because they were truly convinced that the entire US government would collapse if they were gone. Maybe they took 2 days at most of vacation. We had a program where you could donate vacation to fellow employees who had catastrophic illnesses (ie. cancer) and would be out a lot and they used to donate tons of vacation days to that.
I worked in the US office of a European company and we got European vacation benefits on a PTO system. I loved it and thought it was great. I'd still be working there just for the vacation time had the company not gotten rid of a lot of US employees in my city to save money.
My current employer is a US based Fortune 500 company who treats us pretty well in general, but on the downside they have acted like every vacation day we take is stealing from their very soul. No PTO here. We don't get sick leave, but if you are sick for a day or two, you can just stay home and get paid - no vacation time used. If you're out for, I think, 4 days or more, you have to go on short term disability. We got a new, younger CEO a few years ago and he bumped up our vacation time a little bit and they stopped acting like taking vacation was almost like killing the company, but still it will never, ever equal what I was getting with the US government or the European company. They severely limit how much vacation time we can carry over (5 days) and pretty much force us to burn it up. If you really just refuse to take a vacation you can just throw your days in the trash I guess, but I've never heard of that. We get a lot of reminders to use vacation time and there is a policy in my organization that encourages you to use your vacation so you are better rested. I've never heard of anybody having anything negative happen to them because they used vacation time, which is good, but I still wish they were more generous with the amount we get. A lot of US companies are like mine, and they're just not all that generous with vacation time, but at least when we do use it there is no punishment for doing so.
Thank you for that explanation, which is helpful and has some points I hadn't considered. But I do still wonder if whoever said "meh" isn't partly right too. Is this really an AI kind of approach? Different than how computers win at chess, yes, but is it really AI? The whole reason that chess was an AI problem for computers to solve was that early on people thought that to beat humans you'd have to learn how to think. That ended up being wrong. Computers playing chess against humans now is unfair because the computers are basically taking an open book test against humans who have to memorize and think and can't consult an open book. I guess it's impressive for Google in that they aren't doing brute force but are they still doing lookups? Is trying to maximize winning chances really nothing more than limiting which "book" the program consults?
The new CEO used to work at a furniture company but is good friends with the Ford family so that's how he got his job. He knows nothing about cars or autonomous vehicles in spite of being in charge of the AV program. He's just a well connected good old boy.
I don't see how this can help. Ford needs somebody who understands cars and autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles. This guy knows nothing.
Ford has often had incompetent leadership. Maybe finding a way to have less Ford family influence is a good thing.
It's kind of strange that in the Great Recession the general idea was that Ford was the only American car manufacturer that knew what it was doing and now they are slashing jobs (By the way, where's the outrage from the president?) and seem completely clueless. Do consumers want to buy autonomous cars? Seems like a risky bet to me. Young people will just use Uber/Lyft/etc. and have somebody else own and maintain the autonomous cars. Older people are never going to go along with cars they own but can't drive themselves.
4. Never forget the Obama birth certificate crap. That was trying to destroy Obama, presumably to gain political advantage. As a side effect he weakened the ability of that government to get things done. Had their been truth to it, it would be fine, but the purpose was not truth. The purpose was basically A1 grade evil.
As a point of interest, Trump supporters who comment on Scott Adams blog just this week were still bitching about Obama's "fake" birth certificate. How is that even rational any more? Even Trump himself when pinned down about it after winning the primary admitted Obama was born in the USA. But even if this certificate was faked, then we need to deal with the following.
1) Ted Cruz was born in Canada to one US citizen parent. How is that different to Obama being born in Kenya to one US citizen parent? Cruz was allowed to run for president. So even if Obama was born in Kenya, how does that disqualify him from being president? And if somebody is then going to argue that his mother gave up her US citizenship they have to prove it by providing US government records that show it happened.
2) Hillary Clinton very badly wanted to win the Democratic Party nomination in 2008. If Obama was somehow lying about his birth or even worse Constitutionally unqualified to be president, why did she not exploit this? And if you are going to argue that she was a loyal solder, that's just crap. People are accusing her of cheating with the help of party leadership in the primaries last year but somehow dishonest Hillary wouldn't use that information in 2008 for her personal benefit? Yeah. Right.
3) Why did John McCain not use this information to argue in 2008 that his opponent, Obama, might not be qualitied?
4) Why did people in the Republican Party independent of McCain not use this information in 2008 or even 2012 to try to derail Obama's campaign? Why did Romney not use it in 2012 if it was true?
5) How do you explain the birth announcement in a local Hawaiian newspaper announcing Obama's birth? But I suppose if you want to argue that the certificate is faked it's no stretch to argue that this was faked too somehow.
We'd pretty much have to kick them out of Nato and give Russia carte blanche to fight Turkey, which Russia would probably do in order to secure control of the Bosphorus if they knew that the west wouldn't get involved. After the shit Erdogan has pulled, I wouldn't even feel bad about throwing them under the bus like that, and it would probably be better for the country in the long term to have him deposed and the country broken up.
Actually, the fact that Erdogan is leading an illiberal dictatorship he was legally elected to that pretends to be a democracy makes him extremely useful to Putin and makes it almost impossible that Russia would want to attack Turkey and risk him being removed from power. Yes, Russian and Turkish interests do not overlap much for sure, but Turkey has mostly given up on the idea of removing Assad and Russia is continuing to try to leverage Turkey as a business partner (some kind of oil pipeline). Both Erdogan and Putin have been legally elected by short sighted citizens who fail to see the bad sides of both. And if Turkey does become more and more conservatively Islamist as I suspect, in a weird way that plays into Russia's hands because it pisses off the west and pissing off the west is a good thing for Putin. Russians in general and Putin in specific don't have any long term vision so anything that falls into the category of "the west and the US don't like this" makes him happy and Turkey's current government definitely falls into that. Besides, Russia is a master of either creating problems they say only they can solve or exploiting problems created by others by posing themselves as the only solution to them, so Putin probably sees Erdogan in power as nothing but beneficial to them as no matter what happens, Russia will be poised to offer itself as the only solution to it.
We're not the ones making the trailers, and we're not the ones making the crappy movies. Not our fault.
Yep. That's right. Besides, if you watch "Kung Fu Trailers Of Fury", which I do recommend if you're into that kind of thing, on the commentary track, Asian cinema expert Ric Meyers talks about how many of the trailers completely give away the plot of the movies they promote and are little more than highly condensed 2 to 3 minute versions of the films. Keep in mind that these particular trailers were from the 1970s and very early 1980s and were made in Hong Kong. So it's not like nobody anywhere in the past has ever been accused of making trailers that give away plot and this is only a brand new thing.
Actually there are tons of articles out there on the internet right now by sources who should know better who are saying that nobody is going to support MP3 any more. One guy I work with has seen so much of this that he felt the need to personally respond to it on Facebook. No, MP3 is not dead or never going to be supported again, but that hasn't stopped people from saying that anyway.
I appreciate your attempt to use logic and facts by providing links to a paper that showed that concrete can lose cohesion just like in the events of 9/11, but people who want to believe nutty conspiracy theories aren't going to change. Dilbert creator Scott Adams is a big Trump supporter and he sometimes allows comments to his blog and some of them are pretty nutty. One lady was ranting, yesterday I think, about how Obama's birth certificate was clearly faked. If all these years later we've still got people worked up about the birth certificate, and that's not even touching the fact that even if it was faked (which I don't believe) he was born a US citizen and thus eligible to run for president, how we know that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and he was still OK to run for president because he had one US citizen parent (even if Obama was born in Kenya, his mother was still a US citizen) and nobody complains about him, and how the entire Republican Party was unwilling or unable to provide proof of this to try to win elections against him. People are just going to believe what they want regardless of the facts. Adams himself even says as much all the time.
The most interesting part is that it was the Democrats system of Superdelegates, meant to prevent a non-competitive delegate (like Trump) that stopped the more populist Sanders from getting the nomination and some would argue costing them the election
Nonsense. Hillary won a larger number of delegates in the primaries than Obama did in 2008. The superdelegates pushed her over the top, as they did Obama in 2008, but you are implying that Sanders clearly won the nomination and the superdelegates basically stole victory from him and that's as false as it can be. It's actually very unlikely that there will ever be a Democratic primary with more than one candidate where the winner is going to clinch without even counting the superdelegates. I get why people don't like the superdelegates idea and I'n not a fan either, but there hasn't been a single presidential election where they clearly overruled the will of the primary voters. Obama's win in 2008 came closest, but he did (barely) have a delegate lead over Hillary. They are there to provide some kind of way to decide things and prevent chaos at the convention. Stopping a candidate who can't win a national selection is more of a possibility of this system than a reason why it was created. Preventing another 1968 Democratic convention is the real reason it exists. Besides, it's still possible for a candidate the superdelegates hate to win the nomination by simply getting enough votes in the primaries. It may be unlikely, but it's not impossible.
Bernie Sanders was a lot more likely to be another Mondale or McGovern than to beat Trump in the general election anyway. My guess is that he would only get 100-150 electoral votes.
Then you'll be wishing you had the guy who didn't give you feedback. I really don't know what to say about not knowing what to do. It may be a good opportunity to look for things to do on your own. Be warned that sometimes when you open your mouth on this kind of thing, it can backfire on your spectacularly. Your manager may decide that you're "special" and suddenly be all over your workplace all the time because they conclude that you can't work otherwise. Your manager may decide that if you don't know what to work on, maybe they don't really need you at all. You could be perceived as a troublemaker. I'm sure there are some other bad scenarios that could happen besides those.
Manager feedback can be hit or miss. My current manager is pretty good to give useful feedback. I had a manager once when working for the US government who didn't and all she did was give the highest ratings in the office to her friends in the office. Everybody else fought over the scraps as we had an employee evaluation that was point limited for the office, so if 2 people get the highest possible rating, everybody else gets closer to average. If you need priorities then asking a manager "Should I work on A or B now?" is fine. Asking a manager for feedback who isn't giving it to you is risky as I said earlier.
The mainstream media is absolutely retarded and when they see a bunch of Twitter posts about something they jump on it and run with it.
This is correct and there is a good reason for it. Written media, particularly newspapers, is struggling to make money. Even online sources have so much competition that everybody is fighting for the same piece of the pie and the barrier to enter and compete is low enough for everybody to do it. Written media doesn't really understand social media, so the big companies have forced their writers to be on Twitter and maintain certain numbers of followers to keep their jobs. This had led the written media to overemphasize the importance of Twitter because their pointy haired bosses don't understand it at all so they think it's more important than it really is. Also, people who follow you for any reason get you towards the magic count you have to reach to keep your job. So in sports, some writers are just rumor mongers on Twitter because it keeps people following them, even if what they say never happens. If some dude on Facebook who lives in, say, Nebraska and has a pizza delivery job and lives in his mom's basement says he doesn't like what Stephen Colbert said about Trump recently, nobody would care. But if the same nobody gets on Twitter and says the exact same thing, suddenly it becomes relevant and the media covers it. I wish I had a solution to get the media to understand that Twitter isn't important and what people say on it doesn't matter, but as long as maintaining certain levels of Twitter followers is a job requirement, it will continue to be overemphasized.
Yep. They are asking for a miracle at a bargain price. It reminds me of some of the job offers I've seen in the past where a company would ask for an incredibly exotic and unlikely combination of IT skills and offer pay at like 60% of what someone with strong skills in half those things would actually get.
But a bit of googling shows that there's still more than enough justification to call it the best programming language for physics simulations.
Easiest != best
Let's just say I'm going to need a LOT of convincing on this one. I'm old enough to have actually studied computer programming in the 1980s and even then Fortran was dying. No doubt this was done in the days when you could program in whatever you wanted on whatever machine architecture was handy with no thought to having to support it in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Tory back benchers have a lot to answer for. Screwed up Major's government over Europe, forced Cameron into that disastrous, career-ending referendum and have now done the same to May. Not to mention the effect on the country.
I'm an American and I don't claim to be an expert on British politics, but I do in general try to keep up with the goings on in Europe so let's just call me a smart layman and definitely more knowledgeable on Europe in general than most Americans.
I see it differently from you as I'm an outside observer. I think Cameron's problem was pure hubris. After barely dodging a failure on the Scottish independence vote, I think he became convinced that he could put anything up to a vote and he would never lose. Rationally he should have concluded from the Scottish independence vote that he barely dodged a bullet there and it would be in his best interests to not put himself in that kind of situation again, but instead he bet everything he owned on a Brexit referendum that he believed he couldn't lose because he was invincible. Perhaps the "Troy back benchers" as you called them were pretty happy with things that have happened, but I think Cameron was the master of his own fate here a lot more than him giving in to what they wanted.
I've seen two big bubbles in my life in the USA come crashing down - the internet bubble of the 1990s and the previous decade's housing bubble. Here are the signs of a bubble.
1) Prices keep going up even though intelligent people (Slashdotters, for example) can't see any real justification for it.
2) People who don't know anything about the subject come to the conclusion that it will last forever and can't ever lose money.
3) People believe it can't ever go down and start investing in it as a retirement strategy.
4) Stupid people start getting into it. No offense, but when your waitress decides that cryptocurrency is going to be her ticket to becoming wealthy, it's time to get out of it.
5) People start finding high risk ways to put money they don't have into it because they believe that as the price will only go up, they'll soon turn enough profits to pay back the high risk loans they got. Examples would be buying stock on margin and subprime home loans.
6) Big money banks/investment firms in the USA find new ways to invest in it that nobody understands.
I have no problem imagining it, I witnessed it. According to Fox News and every conservative media outlet he was the worst president in history and every single thing he did was the worst and most awful thing ever including things like trying to improve nutrition in schools.
I've got conservative friends who back up what you're saying. I've heard the "Obama was the worst president in history" line more times than I care to count. They all watch Fox News by the way. I pressed one for details and basically it turned out he was just repeating what Sean Hannity said without any specifics. The other one admitted to me that he personally benefited from Obamacare and it really did lower his insurance costs (he owns a small business) but can't really point to anything specific either other than the idea that Obama "apologized for everything" and relations with all of our allies went to hell under Obama. Of course that's not really true, but people still think it.
I do actually care about automobile design and I like the looks of the Tesla, Bolt and Leaf. I had a Leaf for 3 years. I'm somewhat fussy about car looks and it satisfied me. Nissan has a proposed re-design of the Leaf that I think is amazing looking, but nobody knows if it will ever see the light of day. You should be able to find it by searching for "Nissan Leaf next generation" (without the quote marks) but again, taste is subjective so I'd venture a guess that you're not going to like that one either. Personally I think the i3 is "crap on a stick" as a friend would say, so I doubt that you're ever going to see an electric car that meets your unique styling requirements in the next 10 years.
Two words - Internet bubble.
One word - Lucent.
Bell Labs and innovation died because AT&T spun off Lucent in the internet bubble days and put Bell Labs in it. I went to Murray Hill maybe a couple of years before Lucent existed and it still had really smart people there who were interested in doing cool things. Lucent didn't really know what it was doing and it basically killed Bell Labs through incompetence. Lucent doesn't really exist any more. It's passed through 2 more owners and now is some part of Nokia. I was in an investment club during the Internet bubble and I remember we bought Lucent stock and we kept getting stock in spin off companies as Lucent tried desperately to spin off the crap parts of its business, like old school analog phone service, to save the high tech part of it, but nothing they did worked.
I guess it depends how long it takes for Trump to get impeached or otherwise unpresidented through a failed re-election. There is a reason the Trump administration is leaking like an open pipe (a sieve is not leaky enough for this metaphor). The distrust for this man goes beyond mere partisanship, and countless people are risking prison time to try to undo arguably the worst mistake in recent American history.
I still think Trump right now has a greater than 50% chance of getting re-elected and I'll further predict that he won't be impeached. Here's why.
1) Short term demographics favor him and the Republican Party. The people that elected him are very likely in 4 years to still have the numbers to put him back in office. The Democrats will eventually get the majority of voters behind them, but right now too many blacks and young people aren't voting at all, and as both groups skew heavily Democratic, this hurts the Democrats badly.
2) Since 1900, incumbent presidents have almost always won re-election. The few who didn't were presidents in times of great economic distress. Even hugely unpopular presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama won re-election. Think about that.
3) Trump isn't going to get impeached. There's no evidence that he has done anything to warrant that. And we don't want go down that path of "I'm going to impeach the president if he's with the other party every time my party gains control of Congress".
4) The Democrats seem unlikely to me to take the Senate in 2018 given how most of the seats up for election are held by them. Right now I'm guessing that holding 49 seats is probably a best case outcome.
5) As they've got even more ground to make up in the House, they're also unlikely to regain control there. The House is always going to be much harder to take than the Senate.
6) If they somehow do gain control of one or both houses of Congress, Trump will simply blame everything on the Democrats and Republican voters will buy it.
7) I've got lots of conservative friends and their attitudes towards Trump range from absolutely giddy that he won (still) to, at worst, slightly disappointed in a few things. And I'm not sure that if this very ill conceived replacement of Obamacare passes and harms tens of millions of people that it will make any difference in the votes.
8) He may yet do some things that elevate his standing with the voters in general. Solving the North Korea problem permanently in a way that doesn't end up killing millions of people would be one way to do it.
Honestly I wish Twitter would just die and not be replaced with anything like it. I think society would be much better off in the long run and the media on the internet would stop acting like the opinions of nobodies who live in their parents' basements were crucially important. But on to the point at hand.
There's nothing in this plan to stop institutional investors from buying up large numbers of shares and effectively gaining control and doing exactly what the proposers are trying to stop. It's hard to get people to pay for something they get for free and I just don't see users of Twitter being willing to pay to save it. There are 725 million or so shares of Twitter stock available. That requires an awful large number of people to buy 2 or 3 shares each. That's an unrealistic goal.
Also as old as movie critics is studios blaming movie critics for their shitty movies bombing. It's a tired complaint. Anyone who seriously thought a Baywatch reboot or yet another Johnny Depp pirate film were going to be smash hits ought to be forced into early retirement.
Disagree strongly. I haven't seen Baywatch but I was pretty shocked that it came out as an R-rated comedy. That does reduce its audience somewhat. And I have to ask - if you HAD to make it a comedy to get the movie made, should the move have been made at all?
Pirates is a different story. USA Today loved it. And it was easily the box office champ over Memorial Day weekend. It has a 7.1 rating on IMDB, which is quite good. Here's the problem. It was really expensive to make. And even with leading the box office over Memorial Day weekend, and it did like double the business of film #2 which is Guardians Of The Galaxy 2, it didn't bring in enough to give Disney confidence it will turn a profit. I'd like to see Pirates 5 but haven't had time yet (was out of town over the weekend). And Alien:Covenant, which is another film I'd like to see, looks like it may barely break even despite good ratings from customers. Attendance is down at movie theaters right now. Everything that comes out is going to be lower than hoped for. Remember I said it first - Wonder Woman is likely to be underwhelming too where it doesn't make anywhere close to what it's studio is hoping for.
So, do you think she will run roughshod over the DNC to run again in 2020?
No way, for a variety of reasons.
1) I can't imagine the superdelegates actually believe she remains the best option for 2020.
2) The DNC seems hell bent right now on making sure that people, mostly women, as divisive as Hillary remain the main decision makers going forward. If another presidential primary was coming up this year, Elizabeth Warren would be the front runner. And she has a great chance to be another Mondale and McGovern in a general election.
3) The email server stuff would start up all over again by somebody and overshadow everything - again.
4) The last time the Democrats tried the "nominate the same person who lost last time" trick, it didn't work so well. See 1956.
5) Hard to believe the majority of people who voted for Hillary wouldn't strongly prefer another candidate in the 2020 primaries if for no other reason than she lost to a truly terrible opposing candidate.
6) Her health is not great and I had doubts that even if she won that she'd be able to run for re-election. It's not getting better. She is on really powerful blood thinners with huge drawbacks that to me indicate that she has very large underlying health issues, much much more serious than is generally realized by the public. Let's just say that Donald Trump has a much higher chance of having the health needed to be president in 2020 than Hillary does.
Accidentally, on porpoise?
I had the exact same thought. Let's see if any action at all is taken against this engineer.
> . . . an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton
Isn't that the company Snowden worked for?
Yes.
I certainly hope Europe is able to take the mantle of leader of the free world while the US gets its act back together. I am a proud American, but I'm a human first. My country is the second largest polluter in the world, and the largest per capita. I hope more sensible countries around the world band together to show the more ignorant members of my country we cannot get away with it forever. Tariffs or sanctions against the U.S. for its inaction would be a good start.
List of the top 5 polluters by CO2 emissions:
1) China
2) USA
3) European Union
4) India
5) Russia
Here's your real problem. Note that 3 of the so-called BRICS nations are number 1, 4 and 5 on that list. Of those 3 nations on the list, only China really cares any about the environment and even then it's not much. None of them are ever going to really reduce their emissions if there is any chance it could hurt economic development. Even if the US did play along, China, India, Russia and others won't. They'll give lip service to the agreement, but they'll never actually implement enough to make a big difference.
I use CNN for convenience (easy to type) but the BBC is pretty good too. Then again I don't live in the UK, so UK people may have a different opinion of it.
My best friend honestly believes that Fox News is the only news source that is, as they claim, "fair and balanced". He's pretty conservative and he bases this on the idea that they have like one commentator who is liberal and 2 or 3 who aren't crazy wing nuts. He thinks CNN is as about as far left as it gets. His head would explode if he knew the kind of stuff that MSNBC has, which makes CNN almost look conservative. I admit to being disappointed in CNN since Trump became president. Their fact checking is way down and they have a rather large number of online columns from a guy who truly hates Trump. So much for them being objective any more. But at least they do cover stuff that isn't positive about Trump whereas Fox News pretends that anything negative never happened. At any random time compare the headlines online between the two and the difference in what each thinks is important is rather surprising.
I have another friend who more than 20 years ago immigrated from the USSR with his parents to the USA and his mother gets all her news from notorious propaganda source RT. She believes everything they say. She panicked him by calling him and telling him that there was a nuclear bomb dropped in Ukraine because RT said so. Yeah. I had to calm him down by telling him that no other news source reported that. But he's a real momma's boy and she calls him multiple times a day and is always filling his head with some nonsense she sees on RT and neither him nor her will ever stop believing it. People are just going to believe what they want to if it meets their pre-conceptions.
I have worked for roughly a handful of different companies in my IT career and vacation benefits were all over the map. I worked for the federal government once and we got a ton of vacation time. I really liked that and used it, but I remember having two older co-workers who would basically never take a day off because they were truly convinced that the entire US government would collapse if they were gone. Maybe they took 2 days at most of vacation. We had a program where you could donate vacation to fellow employees who had catastrophic illnesses (ie. cancer) and would be out a lot and they used to donate tons of vacation days to that.
I worked in the US office of a European company and we got European vacation benefits on a PTO system. I loved it and thought it was great. I'd still be working there just for the vacation time had the company not gotten rid of a lot of US employees in my city to save money.
My current employer is a US based Fortune 500 company who treats us pretty well in general, but on the downside they have acted like every vacation day we take is stealing from their very soul. No PTO here. We don't get sick leave, but if you are sick for a day or two, you can just stay home and get paid - no vacation time used. If you're out for, I think, 4 days or more, you have to go on short term disability. We got a new, younger CEO a few years ago and he bumped up our vacation time a little bit and they stopped acting like taking vacation was almost like killing the company, but still it will never, ever equal what I was getting with the US government or the European company. They severely limit how much vacation time we can carry over (5 days) and pretty much force us to burn it up. If you really just refuse to take a vacation you can just throw your days in the trash I guess, but I've never heard of that. We get a lot of reminders to use vacation time and there is a policy in my organization that encourages you to use your vacation so you are better rested. I've never heard of anybody having anything negative happen to them because they used vacation time, which is good, but I still wish they were more generous with the amount we get. A lot of US companies are like mine, and they're just not all that generous with vacation time, but at least when we do use it there is no punishment for doing so.
Thank you for that explanation, which is helpful and has some points I hadn't considered. But I do still wonder if whoever said "meh" isn't partly right too. Is this really an AI kind of approach? Different than how computers win at chess, yes, but is it really AI? The whole reason that chess was an AI problem for computers to solve was that early on people thought that to beat humans you'd have to learn how to think. That ended up being wrong. Computers playing chess against humans now is unfair because the computers are basically taking an open book test against humans who have to memorize and think and can't consult an open book. I guess it's impressive for Google in that they aren't doing brute force but are they still doing lookups? Is trying to maximize winning chances really nothing more than limiting which "book" the program consults?
The new CEO used to work at a furniture company but is good friends with the Ford family so that's how he got his job. He knows nothing about cars or autonomous vehicles in spite of being in charge of the AV program. He's just a well connected good old boy. I don't see how this can help. Ford needs somebody who understands cars and autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles. This guy knows nothing.
Ford has often had incompetent leadership. Maybe finding a way to have less Ford family influence is a good thing.
It's kind of strange that in the Great Recession the general idea was that Ford was the only American car manufacturer that knew what it was doing and now they are slashing jobs (By the way, where's the outrage from the president?) and seem completely clueless. Do consumers want to buy autonomous cars? Seems like a risky bet to me. Young people will just use Uber/Lyft/etc. and have somebody else own and maintain the autonomous cars. Older people are never going to go along with cars they own but can't drive themselves.
4. Never forget the Obama birth certificate crap. That was trying to destroy Obama, presumably to gain political advantage. As a side effect he weakened the ability of that government to get things done. Had their been truth to it, it would be fine, but the purpose was not truth. The purpose was basically A1 grade evil.
As a point of interest, Trump supporters who comment on Scott Adams blog just this week were still bitching about Obama's "fake" birth certificate. How is that even rational any more? Even Trump himself when pinned down about it after winning the primary admitted Obama was born in the USA. But even if this certificate was faked, then we need to deal with the following.
1) Ted Cruz was born in Canada to one US citizen parent. How is that different to Obama being born in Kenya to one US citizen parent? Cruz was allowed to run for president. So even if Obama was born in Kenya, how does that disqualify him from being president? And if somebody is then going to argue that his mother gave up her US citizenship they have to prove it by providing US government records that show it happened.
2) Hillary Clinton very badly wanted to win the Democratic Party nomination in 2008. If Obama was somehow lying about his birth or even worse Constitutionally unqualified to be president, why did she not exploit this? And if you are going to argue that she was a loyal solder, that's just crap. People are accusing her of cheating with the help of party leadership in the primaries last year but somehow dishonest Hillary wouldn't use that information in 2008 for her personal benefit? Yeah. Right.
3) Why did John McCain not use this information to argue in 2008 that his opponent, Obama, might not be qualitied?
4) Why did people in the Republican Party independent of McCain not use this information in 2008 or even 2012 to try to derail Obama's campaign? Why did Romney not use it in 2012 if it was true?
5) How do you explain the birth announcement in a local Hawaiian newspaper announcing Obama's birth? But I suppose if you want to argue that the certificate is faked it's no stretch to argue that this was faked too somehow.
We'd pretty much have to kick them out of Nato and give Russia carte blanche to fight Turkey, which Russia would probably do in order to secure control of the Bosphorus if they knew that the west wouldn't get involved. After the shit Erdogan has pulled, I wouldn't even feel bad about throwing them under the bus like that, and it would probably be better for the country in the long term to have him deposed and the country broken up.
Actually, the fact that Erdogan is leading an illiberal dictatorship he was legally elected to that pretends to be a democracy makes him extremely useful to Putin and makes it almost impossible that Russia would want to attack Turkey and risk him being removed from power. Yes, Russian and Turkish interests do not overlap much for sure, but Turkey has mostly given up on the idea of removing Assad and Russia is continuing to try to leverage Turkey as a business partner (some kind of oil pipeline). Both Erdogan and Putin have been legally elected by short sighted citizens who fail to see the bad sides of both. And if Turkey does become more and more conservatively Islamist as I suspect, in a weird way that plays into Russia's hands because it pisses off the west and pissing off the west is a good thing for Putin. Russians in general and Putin in specific don't have any long term vision so anything that falls into the category of "the west and the US don't like this" makes him happy and Turkey's current government definitely falls into that. Besides, Russia is a master of either creating problems they say only they can solve or exploiting problems created by others by posing themselves as the only solution to them, so Putin probably sees Erdogan in power as nothing but beneficial to them as no matter what happens, Russia will be poised to offer itself as the only solution to it.
We're not the ones making the trailers, and we're not the ones making the crappy movies. Not our fault.
Yep. That's right. Besides, if you watch "Kung Fu Trailers Of Fury", which I do recommend if you're into that kind of thing, on the commentary track, Asian cinema expert Ric Meyers talks about how many of the trailers completely give away the plot of the movies they promote and are little more than highly condensed 2 to 3 minute versions of the films. Keep in mind that these particular trailers were from the 1970s and very early 1980s and were made in Hong Kong. So it's not like nobody anywhere in the past has ever been accused of making trailers that give away plot and this is only a brand new thing.
Actually there are tons of articles out there on the internet right now by sources who should know better who are saying that nobody is going to support MP3 any more. One guy I work with has seen so much of this that he felt the need to personally respond to it on Facebook. No, MP3 is not dead or never going to be supported again, but that hasn't stopped people from saying that anyway.
I appreciate your attempt to use logic and facts by providing links to a paper that showed that concrete can lose cohesion just like in the events of 9/11, but people who want to believe nutty conspiracy theories aren't going to change. Dilbert creator Scott Adams is a big Trump supporter and he sometimes allows comments to his blog and some of them are pretty nutty. One lady was ranting, yesterday I think, about how Obama's birth certificate was clearly faked. If all these years later we've still got people worked up about the birth certificate, and that's not even touching the fact that even if it was faked (which I don't believe) he was born a US citizen and thus eligible to run for president, how we know that Ted Cruz was born in Canada and he was still OK to run for president because he had one US citizen parent (even if Obama was born in Kenya, his mother was still a US citizen) and nobody complains about him, and how the entire Republican Party was unwilling or unable to provide proof of this to try to win elections against him. People are just going to believe what they want regardless of the facts. Adams himself even says as much all the time.
The most interesting part is that it was the Democrats system of Superdelegates, meant to prevent a non-competitive delegate (like Trump) that stopped the more populist Sanders from getting the nomination and some would argue costing them the election
Nonsense. Hillary won a larger number of delegates in the primaries than Obama did in 2008. The superdelegates pushed her over the top, as they did Obama in 2008, but you are implying that Sanders clearly won the nomination and the superdelegates basically stole victory from him and that's as false as it can be. It's actually very unlikely that there will ever be a Democratic primary with more than one candidate where the winner is going to clinch without even counting the superdelegates. I get why people don't like the superdelegates idea and I'n not a fan either, but there hasn't been a single presidential election where they clearly overruled the will of the primary voters. Obama's win in 2008 came closest, but he did (barely) have a delegate lead over Hillary. They are there to provide some kind of way to decide things and prevent chaos at the convention. Stopping a candidate who can't win a national selection is more of a possibility of this system than a reason why it was created. Preventing another 1968 Democratic convention is the real reason it exists. Besides, it's still possible for a candidate the superdelegates hate to win the nomination by simply getting enough votes in the primaries. It may be unlikely, but it's not impossible.
Bernie Sanders was a lot more likely to be another Mondale or McGovern than to beat Trump in the general election anyway. My guess is that he would only get 100-150 electoral votes.
Then you'll be wishing you had the guy who didn't give you feedback. I really don't know what to say about not knowing what to do. It may be a good opportunity to look for things to do on your own. Be warned that sometimes when you open your mouth on this kind of thing, it can backfire on your spectacularly. Your manager may decide that you're "special" and suddenly be all over your workplace all the time because they conclude that you can't work otherwise. Your manager may decide that if you don't know what to work on, maybe they don't really need you at all. You could be perceived as a troublemaker. I'm sure there are some other bad scenarios that could happen besides those.
Manager feedback can be hit or miss. My current manager is pretty good to give useful feedback. I had a manager once when working for the US government who didn't and all she did was give the highest ratings in the office to her friends in the office. Everybody else fought over the scraps as we had an employee evaluation that was point limited for the office, so if 2 people get the highest possible rating, everybody else gets closer to average. If you need priorities then asking a manager "Should I work on A or B now?" is fine. Asking a manager for feedback who isn't giving it to you is risky as I said earlier.
The mainstream media is absolutely retarded and when they see a bunch of Twitter posts about something they jump on it and run with it.
This is correct and there is a good reason for it. Written media, particularly newspapers, is struggling to make money. Even online sources have so much competition that everybody is fighting for the same piece of the pie and the barrier to enter and compete is low enough for everybody to do it. Written media doesn't really understand social media, so the big companies have forced their writers to be on Twitter and maintain certain numbers of followers to keep their jobs. This had led the written media to overemphasize the importance of Twitter because their pointy haired bosses don't understand it at all so they think it's more important than it really is. Also, people who follow you for any reason get you towards the magic count you have to reach to keep your job. So in sports, some writers are just rumor mongers on Twitter because it keeps people following them, even if what they say never happens. If some dude on Facebook who lives in, say, Nebraska and has a pizza delivery job and lives in his mom's basement says he doesn't like what Stephen Colbert said about Trump recently, nobody would care. But if the same nobody gets on Twitter and says the exact same thing, suddenly it becomes relevant and the media covers it. I wish I had a solution to get the media to understand that Twitter isn't important and what people say on it doesn't matter, but as long as maintaining certain levels of Twitter followers is a job requirement, it will continue to be overemphasized.
Yep. They are asking for a miracle at a bargain price. It reminds me of some of the job offers I've seen in the past where a company would ask for an incredibly exotic and unlikely combination of IT skills and offer pay at like 60% of what someone with strong skills in half those things would actually get.
But a bit of googling shows that there's still more than enough justification to call it the best programming language for physics simulations.
Easiest != best
Let's just say I'm going to need a LOT of convincing on this one. I'm old enough to have actually studied computer programming in the 1980s and even then Fortran was dying. No doubt this was done in the days when you could program in whatever you wanted on whatever machine architecture was handy with no thought to having to support it in the future.