I live and grew up in a red state. Because of my background a significant number of my friends on Facebook are die hard Republicans. A small number of those spend way too much time worrying about politics and sharing fake news items and various anti-Democratic Party stories. Some of what I've seen is actually offensive. But is anybody actually convinced to change their minds because of this? All I see is other die hard Republicans comment about how true this stuff is. A rather large part of the US voting population is party locked and they are just not ever going to vote for the other party no matter what. Does it really matter if these stories are lies if all they do is preach to the already converted? Studies have shown that people deliberately seek out sources of information to reinforce already decided opinions and that if you confront people who hold a false belief with real proof that their belief is false, they will actually double down on the false belief and get even more adamant that it can't be wrong.
And I'm just as sure that a rather large number, at least in the USA, like things just fine with the lies. I grew up in a small town in a red state and I have some friends from school days on Facebook They are almost all die hard Republicans. It is unreal the kind of crap they keep sharing with fake news that supports their political beliefs. I don't see any desire from these folks to get accurate information. In fact, with one person when people have tried to point her to Snopes, she now counters back with the argument that Snopes is actually pro-Democratic and lies to help them. For those of you not aware, this is a tactic the people who write the lies have used for some years now. They claim that any source that debunks them is itself biased and lying, so a lot of people just don't bother to check anything and pass it on as facts if matches their own political views. One guy I both knew in school used to share those kind of bogus stories a lot and when I pointed him to the information debunking what he passed on, he said that it wasn't his job to judge the accuracy or truth of the articles he passed on. He was just sharing information and it was up to the reader to decide whether it was true or accurate.
Other than it being announced after the Election, there doesn't seem to be anything political in the announcement.
Sales are down on vehicles made at those two plant and they are cutting the Third Shift at both plants.
Nothing about moving production elsewhere or even discontinuing the two other shifts at both plants.
Yeah. I can't speak to Cadillac but I can to the Chevy Cruze. A few years ago I got a Nissan Leaf on lease to use as a daily commute to work car and I had an older car I used for longer trips. I didn't really want to keep the older car but I also wasn't at the time really enthused about outright buying something, so getting a leased car was a way to take miles off the old car and think about what I wanted to get in a new car. I wanted to keep an open mind for a new car and one time I had to get a rental car and one of the options was the Cruze. It gets good mileage, so I thought I'd ask for the Cruze as my rental car and try it out. It sucked. It's really small. The interior is really crappy and cheap and unnecessarily so. And the mileage wasn't as great as I'd hoped. I crossed that off my list of potential vehicles to buy. So I totally get that sales of the Cruze are down because it's not a very good car. Chevy does make good cars but the Cruze isn't one of them.
There are good arguments for and against keeping the electoral college and for and against using the popular vote instead. The best argument I know for keeping the electoral college is this - In a disputed election, it narrows the area of the dispute substantially instead of making the entire country do a recount. In the 2000 election only what happened in Florida was in dispute and that's because of the electoral college. In 2000 Gore won New Mexico by less than 400 votes. Yes, you read that correctly - less than 400 votes. That's four hundred not four thousand. Because New Mexico only had 5 electoral votes it didn't matter whether the vote totals were completely accurate or not. The dispute over Florida became the critical issue because both Gore and Bush needed it to win and New Mexico didn't have enough votes to put either guy over the top. The US is too polarized and it's only getting worse. Every presidential election from now on is going to have the supporters of the losing party acting like the election was stolen from them and they were cheated. We don't need to add to the existing chaos and switch to a popular vote where the loser and their supporters are going to demand national recounts every time.
And it did so permanently. Once you become a state, you can't "unjoin", secede or leave. End of story.
Now if the government would actually start charging people with treason for saying this kind of crap and prosecute them and make them look at real jail time in a real prison, that might just put an end to it. Even former Texas governor Rick Perry was talking succession smack talk for a while. The state of Georgia passed a law 4 years ago that the current governor signed that says if the state legislature votes to nullify a federal law or executive order because they decided that it wasn't constitutional, the citizens and the state of Georgia don't have to obey said law or order. That's not succession but it's close. And the Obama administration didn't even threaten anybody over that.
I am very sorry to read your story. But Trump swore to repeal Obamacare. I bet it will literally be the first thing Congress votes on after he's sworn in. What gets me is that everybody I know who hates Obamacare doesn't actually depend on it. They have health insurance from work. I have one friend who is a small businessman who admitted to me that he has been much better off under the law because it drove down the cost for health insurance for him and his family, but he still voted for Trump. I'm positive the Republican plan won't work and it will be a disaster for people like your sister, but too many people who vote Republican don't care. They'll blame your sister for taking the job she did instead of working for a major corporation.
What amazes me about the whole health care thing here is the bs we heard 8 years ago about "death panels". A Republican Senator from Georgia simply asked that hospice care include counseling if needed about end of life issues and Sarah Palin turned that into Obama and the big bad Democrats want to kill your relatives by forming Death Panels to refuse to pay when you need expensive treatment to save their lives. I've got news for Republicans. Death Panels really did exist before Sarah Palin got famous. They were called insurance companies. They had lifetime maximums and could refuse to cover you if you had certain conditions. Now we're going to return to those days. They can't kill it for 2017 because Trump won't be sworn in until around Jan. 20 (forgot the exact date) and once the new year starts, you can't really take insurance away until the next calendar year. So your sister has a year to maybe find a new job with a different employers who can give her real health insurance.
If the democrats learn a single lesson from this election, it's that:
Democracy is compromise.
Starting a negotiation with the premise (stated stridently and repeatedly) that anyone who disagrees with your opinion is a complete and utter fucking moron doesn't make you right. It makes people hate you.
Trust me plenty of Republicans need to learn this too. One Trump supporter who is an old school friend did a share on Facebook of a post that equated voting for Hillary Clinton with Jews in WWII "willingly marching to their death". There's so much horribly horribly wrong with that on all levels that I don't even know where to begin in attacking it. Demonizing the opposition is the fault of both parties.
1) Both the Bush and Clinton crime families are finished. They will never hold any power in either side of the Ruling Party again.
Correct. Jeb Bush's failure in the primaries was the final nail in the coffin. The Bushes are now the Kennedys. I mean they can still win state elections but they're done as a national political force.
2) Trump is ego driven. He has no actual policy agenda..
Well, he's got some. I'm pretty sure by Jan. 1, 2018 (yes 2018 - they can't kill it for 2017) that Obamacare will be permanently dead. And he may actually get advice on foreign policy from people with real experience instead of the academics I believe were constantly giving terrible advice to Obama.
3) Trey Gowdy might actually have enough integrity to prosecute criminals from both sides of the Ruling Party. Obama gave Bush's minions a walk as a professional courtesy.
It's not a big deal to me now whether or not Hillary goes to jail. Don't care either way. But some people do.
4) This defeat is an opportunity for the Democrats to clean house, big time. (Not that I really expect them to do so, but still.)
Correct. Unfortunately the Republicans need that to be done even more and that's now been put off for at least 8 years.
Twitter has been around for a decade, and some people still just don't get it, they don't understand why people use it (people love to communicate) and they don't understand how money is made (data mining and selling ad impressions)
I don't get it, but not for the reasons you listed. I understand that in theory Twitter could be useful. I argue that because people are asshats and the internet makes them even more so that Twitter will never be useful. Twitter is used mostly to insult and threaten strangers, to lie (ask anybody who follows sports writers on Twitter) and to waste time (yes, we all really must know what the Kardashians are doing 24x7). As far as making money goes, maybe you need to tell that to Twitter itself. The most recent financials I could quickly find show losses in 2015, 2014 and 2013 and there are multiple articles throughout this year talking about how nobody wants to buy Twitter because it isn't profitable. In fact their stock price got beat up in October for that very reason. Honestly I thought that by now Twitter would be like MySpace is and everybody under 24 or so would have long since abandoned it to the older folks and it would eventually die. But it turns out that young people like to insult, be lied to and follow the Kardashians as much as their parents do.
Another way of looking at it is that US workers are more exploitable. The lack of safety nets, the need for private health insurance, incredibly high student debt, lack of unions. They all work to make it easier to exploit US workers with long hours and poor conditions.
It seems like the high wages are just to cover living costs, especially in places like Silicon Valley where rents are insane. It also creates a race to the bottom where everyone is competing to work longer and harder than the next guy.
Japan and the EU have laws to prevent exploitation and limit the number of hours people can work a week, specifically to prevent all that from happening. Wages are lower but so is the cost of living. Except for the UK most students don't have massive debts, and getting sick isn't the leading cause of bankruptcy. Except for the UK, there are often rent controls too.
There's also the issue of vacation. There are always exceptions, but in general my experience is that employers in America act like mine does about vacation. My employer in general treats its employees well and as a result has had a lot of long term employees stay, but they do tend to sort of act like every vacation day you take is just killing their very soul. They are certainly not generous at all about vacation. I've worked other jobs in the USA that had much more generous vacation benefits, but those jobs had big downsides to them that my current job doesn't have, which is why I'm here. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that the average American worker gets way less vacation than his European counterpart. I worked in the last decade in a US office of a European company and everybody everywhere in the company got really good vacation benefits.
There's a huge drive in the industry to drop costs and some startups compete with established companies simply on price. The margins are razor thin in some industries and you'd think there are already enough companies competing, but some new company will start up and offer a lower rate than ever before in the race to the bottom. I don't want to name my company, but we have competitors who start up against one tiny segment of our business every year and it's hard for me to see any real innovation. They can do what we do cheaper than us, but often they only do half of it and charge 2/3 of what charge. I've heard of customers who left us over cost to go to a startup where their stuff didn't work at all and the customer came crawling back to us after losing a ton of money trying to save money by leaving us.
There are limits to work hours in Japan and the EU, but these are routinely ignored. In Japan and South Korea employees are forced with no choice to opt out to go to long after hours drinking sessions for "team building", which is part of why there is a business in the big cities for temporary tiny hotel rooms so employees too drunk to go home can sleep it off and stagger into work the next day. On my former job I had colleagues in France who told me that they had to stay at work for at least 10 hours a day, Monday - Friday, even though it was a clear violation of French law. They told me that the final 2 hours of the day they rarely did any real work, but if they left after 8 hours management got very upset with them so they stayed late and wasted time just to get management off their backs.
Yes, we need to remember those quotes by Benajin Franklin and those other famous founding fathers like
Tosam Jefferson
Groeg Washington
Alexnader Hamilton
Jasm Madison
Samle Adams
and others.
As far as Turkey goes, Trump is right about NATO. It is a Cold War relic, given that the membership still reflects what it was when the Soviets were the adversary. Since 2001, when Islam replaced Communism as the main enemy of the West, it makes more sense to form a new alliance of non-Muslim countries in the periphery - Russia, Israel, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and some others. Maybe expand that alliance to the East to include Thailand, Philippines, Myanmar, India and Sri Lanka. But keep Turkey out!!!
I liked your suggestion of an independent Kurdistan, but I can't get on board with this one. The only thing keeping the Baltic States independent is NATO. I have no doubt that if not for NATO Putin would have already manufactured a crisis in them where ethnic Russians were supposedly at risk and used that to justify invading them. The whole reason NATO exists is to protect member states from Russian invasion. That's a real threat. Russia has even tried to intimidate Finland and Sweden, the first one especially, by warning them of the dire consequences of joining NATO. However, Russian threats to both have pushed them closer than ever to joining as his air force's fly bys have made both think that they may have to join to be protected.
Additionally your lists are well-intentioned but not likely. Ehtopia and South Sudan are of questionable stability. Cyprus is completely under the control of Turkey in the north (it invaded in the early 70s to "protect" ethnic Turks and it never left). Serbia and Russia have some bizarre ties that don't really to me make a lot of sense, but they exist nonetheless and Serbia is if anything somewhat of a Putin apologist. Greece has always been kind of iffy in NATO although they have dropped the constant anti-American bs that propped up some pretty bad governments they had in the past. Thailand is now so pro-China that their usefulness to the USA is really under question. The Philippines have a president who is either mentally ill or at best badly playing over head in a game he can't win. Myanmar is still too closely tied to China, although that may change. I'm not sure that Sri Lanka wants to do much more than focus on their own issues at the moment.
Given all the things that Erdogan has done in the wake of the 'coup', it makes me wonder whether it was actually a coup attempt, or just Erdogan's version of the Reichstag fire.
You are not alone in thinking that. As an outside observer somewhat interested in Europe in general and how Turkey relates to it, I figure either the whole thing was concocted by Erdogan to justify what followed or the coup plotters very badly underestimated the dissatisfaction with Erdogan's rule. There are plenty of people in Turkey who don't like Erdogan or what he's doing. The problem is that they're in the minority and have no power any more.
This is such a sad situation, as corporations are cashing in on the legacy of Gene Roddenberry.
Since his death, the echoes of his influence have faded. Resulting in a "Star Trek in name only" sci-fi universe.
Unfortunately there are always people like you. I'll bet you watched maybe a handful of episodes of anything not TOS or STTNG (maybe not even that) and dismissed them. Or maybe you've never seen anything after STTNG. The people I know who bitch the most in the USA about airline security are people who never, ever fly. The people who bitch the most about Trek after TOS are those who never watched it either.
As a long time fan, I can tell you that Roddenberry's influence and importance to Trek is vastly overrated. Season 3 of TOS was pretty much done with him in a caretaker role. Season 3 wasn't perfect (Spock's Brain) but it did have some really good episodes too. The Next Generation only got good after Roddenberry's influence waned due to health issues and Michael Piller basically ran things. Roddenberry had a fairly negative influence on STTNG in my opinion. He demanded rewrites that weren't necessary or better just to push his own particular vision of the future. He was kind of infamous before STTNG started for maybe being way too focused on trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of TOS, not because he loved Trek, but because he loved the money it brought. He was also kind of infamous for not paying his employees very well, which led to the situation where to avoid giving some assistant a raise he gave the guy a new job title instead and in theory made that guy the sole determiner of what was and was not Star Trek canon. That led to this guy saying that Star Trek The Animated Series was not canon, a decision still not accepted by a large number of Trek fans. Note that Roddenberry himself never said that the animated series wasn't canon. He let some dude who worked for him make the determination because it allowed him to avoid giving the guy a raise. I appreciate what he did, with some reservations, for Trek. Note that good people like David Gerrold and DC Fontana had little to no impact on STTNG because of issues either directly with Roddenberry or issues with others that he could have but chose not to resolve. Roddenberry deserves some big criticism in my opinion for the whole Gates McFadden issue where she was fired after season 1 because she complained about the sexist scripts in the season. Patrick Stewart has stated that he was shocked when she was fired because he and others on the show felt the same way about the scripts. Note that Roddenberry had a huge influence on the season 1 scripts so he was either personally responsible for a lot of what she complained about or simply did nothing to tone it down. Roddenberry may not have been the person who fired her, but he sure as hell didn't fight it and jumped at the chance to bring on his old friend Diana Muldaur to replace McFadden. McFadden returned for season 3 probably because Roddenberry's health had declined to a point where he couldn't really do anything on STTNG any more. But he deserves some praise too. He let Denis Crosby out of her contract in season 1 as a person favor to her when he didn't have to. Wil Wheaton also has very good things to say about him. It's a bit of a mixed legacy.
Just make a normal working WiFi in trains. Still in 19th century there was a direct train from Saint Petersburg to Nice via Vienna. Nowadays despite a lot of talking about European Union Association for such countries as Ukraine, it is not possible to go by train from Vienna to Kiev directly. The same as during the Cold War, nothing changed.
In the past decade I went by plane between Kiev and Vienna a decent number of times. There are probably a couple of reasons for a lack of a direct train line. One is that Ukrainians need visas to go everywhere in the EU, even next door Poland. Some former members of the Warsaw Pact made it pretty easy for Ukrainians to get visas to visit there, but once Schengen came into force, that all changed. Austria wasn't particularly easy for Ukrainians to get visas for, even before Schengen. The other is that there simply may not be that much demand for it. I've flown into Odessa, Kiev and Donnetsk (RIP Donnetsk Airport, a casualty of fighting in the east), multiple times for the first two and almost always from Vienna on those, and the planes were usually half full at best. On the flight over to Ukraine there were a few times that the plane was mostly full, but on the way to Vienna it almost never was, probably due to the visa issue. Keep in mind too that until roughly 11 years ago Ukraine required visas for just about everybody unless they lived somewhere in the former USSR. Visas were easy to get and Ukraine never had that crazy visa registration nonsense that Russia used to do to tourists, but the fact that you had to get them in advance did discourage a lot of foreigners from going there at the time. On the flights I took, most of the passengers were businessmen. There's been talk of the EU dropping visas for Ukrainians and that has finally gotten approval to negotiate the terms between the EU and Ukraine. Once that happens, the chance of a direct train line may increase. Note that Ukraine, as a former part of the old Russian Empire, uses a different gauge than western Europe, so even if a "direct" line is established, it will require a train change at a border.
How would you know? Seriously, this is not trolling. How many countries has Russia invaded for profit or global politics and how many did the USA? Who used nuclear bombs on civilians? When has Russia ruled the world so that we cab compare?
It seems to me that the old-fashioned communists in Russia [and their modern day descendants] were much worse towards their population that towards foreigners, whereas USA seems to be the reverse. As I a neither American nor Russian, I prefer the Russian way.
Russia invaded Afghanistan for starters. You might have heard of that. That is the starting point for Al Queda and Daesh in so far as religious opposition to the Russian invasion led to the kind of thinking that started Al Queda and Daesh both. Osama Bin Laden got his start fighting Russians in Afghanistan. Hungary and the former Czech Republic were both essentially invaded by Soviet troops to put down liberalizing political regimes that came to power.
In the past decade I was engaged for a while to a woman in Ukraine. We didn't end up getting married and she's now married to a guy there and happy. I still have some limited few times a year contact with her. Her family was ethnically Ukrainian, born and raised in Ukraine, and in the 1930s one of her grandfathers had both of his parents killed by Stalin's henchmen for supposedly supporting Ukrainian nationalism. He was orphaned because the Russians thought his parents might want an independent Ukraine. Let me guess. I bet you are Dutch. For some reason it seems like everytime somebody here says some crap like the Russians and Americans are both super evil or "I prefer the Russians", the guy posting it is Dutch. I'm probably going to lose points for saying that, but if that wasn't true so many times I wouldn't say it.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas of the USA. Like pretty much all US metro areas, the number of people who actually live within the city limits of the major city we are named for is a lot lower than then entire metro area. Roughly 10% of the metro residents live with the city limits and 90% live outside it. In fact, the county where I live has more than double the population of the city itself, but no parts of my county are within the city limits. Google negotiated a deal with the city only in our metro area to keep their costs down. So nobody in my county can get Google fiber. The problem with Google's deal is that they didn't study the demographics here. Very roughly speaking, there are only two kinds of people who live within city limits because of outrageous property prices - the very poor and the very rich. The poor don't buy Google fiber. The rich can afford whatever they want to pay so there's no real reason for them to get Google fiber unless they really want to. Google advertises a surprising amount on local TV. Well, I'd love to be a customer, Google, but you didn't want to deal with my county, so you're out of luck. Maybe if you had instead offered it to my entire county instead of only the metro's city limits, you'd have had more business. Believe me, many of us would love to leave Comcast and AT&T but they are the only games where we live.
Actually, both the US and Russian people downplay the role the other played. The average US person acts like the US did 99% of the work in WWII, the UK maybe did 1% but they can't remember their old high school history exactly to be sure of that, and nobody else was even in the war for the Allies, right? On the Russian side, they act like the US, UK, Canada and whoever else were just playing cards on the beach until the Russians marched into Berlin and ended everything.
The actually reality is that Russia had some smart generals, but that was almost by blind luck because paranoid "Uncle Joe" Stalin had actually killed off a rather large part of the Russian Amy's leadership by the time the sneak German invasion happened. The Russians are lucky that a few good ones somehow survived. A lot of the Russian "tactics" involved just throwing large numbers of troops at the Nazis and overwhelming them by sheer numbers. I don't want to suggest that there wasn't any better planning than this or there weren't legitimate victories by just outsmarting the Nazis, but in some cases the Russians simply had the numbers. A small part of their strategy at times involved suicidal attacks that seemingly didn't lack for volunteers, which was something the Germans weren't willing to do. Suicide bombers willingly blew up tanks for example. And I think it's fair to state that in general the Nazis didn't put their best on the Eastern front and the Russians sometimes faced poorly trained and equipped troops from places like Romania and Hungary instead of solid Nazi troops. It took longer in the west to march to Berlin because of geography and better Nazi troops. I agree with you that lend-lease is hugely overrated for the "help" it provided to the Russians and arguably it's biggest "accomplishment" was that Stalin ordered his boys to disassemble some plane (I don't remember which one) they got that ended up providing the basis for a huge jump in their aviation industry and had some impact on the Korean War where Russian pilots pretended to be either Chinese or North Korean pilots and unofficially flew for both of those countries.
Yeah, it's unreal how many posts in my feed I get pushing a pro-Trump agenda, even from people who I know that I never in any way respond to anything they post. In fact, the crazier the post, it seems like it makes more likely to get a big push from Facebook. I remain appalled by a post a former classmate shared from another person who equated voting for Hillary Clinton to be identical to being a Jew "willingly" matching to the Nazi gas chambers in WWII. No joke. I have a policy that I don't post political stuff in my account and I almost never respond to what others post, but that is just so appealingly wrong that it amazes me that people actually don't think at all about what they pass on that others say. I see stuff constantly from right wing friends who post insisting that the US is teetering on the edge of disaster and that if Hillary Clinton becomes president it is GAME OVER for the USA. Apparently Facebook has some trending news stories section that I never use but enough people do use and that's where the shaping of articles was going on.
A couple of years ago I was in a relationship with a lady who lied throughout our relationship. She told one fairly big lie in the beginning and got caught and I forgave her and gave her another chance. My reward for this was that she continued to lie to me about various things. It just took a lot longer to figure that out. In fact, I'd say that her default position on just about anything was to lie about it. She just had a lot of issues and I guess she was afraid that even the smallest issue would be a major problem for me, so she continued to lie. In the end I caught her in very big and longstanding lie that completely destroyed my ability to trust her ever again and also brought to light many other related lies that she had told to support the big lie, so our relationship ended. In the end I was left not really knowing what, if anything, she had ever told me was true. It really brought home to me the idea that trust is the foundation for a relationship and when there is no trust, there can't be a successful relationship.
It really doesn't matter if this is true or not. Either way, it won't be fixed in time. The bottom line reality is that Russia, China, Brazil and India simply don't care. China does care a little but only a little. None of them are going to reduce emissions if it harms economic growth. They've all been clear that they think it's unfair that the more developed countries who got there faster got to pollute all they wanted to with no consequence in the past. So everybody should really hope that the climate change folks are mistaken because this is simply not solvable with those 4 at a minimum being unwilling to do anything about it.
There is starting to be some pushback in some places over this. St. Louis refused to subsidize a new stadium and they don't have an NFL team any more. Currently in MLB, the Arizona Diamondbacks are demanding that the county where their stadium is located either build them a new stadium or pay for upgrades on the current one so costly that they might as well just build a new stadium. The county is calling their bluff and telling them that they'd rather lose the team than pay even for the upgrades and the Diamondbacks are threatening to move, but nobody knows if there even is anywhere that wants them.
OK,,I admit that his weird popularity is just one of those strange, unpredictable things that happens. I don't think it was part of any great plan that went any further than trying to maximize his chance of getting allowed to ask a question on TV. But why is nobody questioning Bone's claim that he's still somehow "undecided"? I mean, I guess it's possible, but he's probably just about the only person who is. And exactly how much more info does he need to make up his mind? At this point everybody has not only made up their mind but they're hardening their positions and no more future revelations of misconduct on either side are likely to get people to change their vote. I honestly don't know a single person who has told me that they don't know who they are going to vote for. I know a lot of people who are really unhappy with who they are going to vote for, but I don't know anybody who still can't come to a decision about it. And yes, these FCC "guidelines" are pure crap.
Slashdot Mirror
I live and grew up in a red state. Because of my background a significant number of my friends on Facebook are die hard Republicans. A small number of those spend way too much time worrying about politics and sharing fake news items and various anti-Democratic Party stories. Some of what I've seen is actually offensive. But is anybody actually convinced to change their minds because of this? All I see is other die hard Republicans comment about how true this stuff is. A rather large part of the US voting population is party locked and they are just not ever going to vote for the other party no matter what. Does it really matter if these stories are lies if all they do is preach to the already converted? Studies have shown that people deliberately seek out sources of information to reinforce already decided opinions and that if you confront people who hold a false belief with real proof that their belief is false, they will actually double down on the false belief and get even more adamant that it can't be wrong.
And I'm just as sure that a rather large number, at least in the USA, like things just fine with the lies. I grew up in a small town in a red state and I have some friends from school days on Facebook They are almost all die hard Republicans. It is unreal the kind of crap they keep sharing with fake news that supports their political beliefs. I don't see any desire from these folks to get accurate information. In fact, with one person when people have tried to point her to Snopes, she now counters back with the argument that Snopes is actually pro-Democratic and lies to help them. For those of you not aware, this is a tactic the people who write the lies have used for some years now. They claim that any source that debunks them is itself biased and lying, so a lot of people just don't bother to check anything and pass it on as facts if matches their own political views. One guy I both knew in school used to share those kind of bogus stories a lot and when I pointed him to the information debunking what he passed on, he said that it wasn't his job to judge the accuracy or truth of the articles he passed on. He was just sharing information and it was up to the reader to decide whether it was true or accurate.
But it's only "evil" when Trump is involved in something.
Yes. You definitely do understand!
Other than it being announced after the Election, there doesn't seem to be anything political in the announcement.
Sales are down on vehicles made at those two plant and they are cutting the Third Shift at both plants. Nothing about moving production elsewhere or even discontinuing the two other shifts at both plants.
Yeah. I can't speak to Cadillac but I can to the Chevy Cruze. A few years ago I got a Nissan Leaf on lease to use as a daily commute to work car and I had an older car I used for longer trips. I didn't really want to keep the older car but I also wasn't at the time really enthused about outright buying something, so getting a leased car was a way to take miles off the old car and think about what I wanted to get in a new car. I wanted to keep an open mind for a new car and one time I had to get a rental car and one of the options was the Cruze. It gets good mileage, so I thought I'd ask for the Cruze as my rental car and try it out. It sucked. It's really small. The interior is really crappy and cheap and unnecessarily so. And the mileage wasn't as great as I'd hoped. I crossed that off my list of potential vehicles to buy. So I totally get that sales of the Cruze are down because it's not a very good car. Chevy does make good cars but the Cruze isn't one of them.
There are good arguments for and against keeping the electoral college and for and against using the popular vote instead. The best argument I know for keeping the electoral college is this - In a disputed election, it narrows the area of the dispute substantially instead of making the entire country do a recount. In the 2000 election only what happened in Florida was in dispute and that's because of the electoral college. In 2000 Gore won New Mexico by less than 400 votes. Yes, you read that correctly - less than 400 votes. That's four hundred not four thousand. Because New Mexico only had 5 electoral votes it didn't matter whether the vote totals were completely accurate or not. The dispute over Florida became the critical issue because both Gore and Bush needed it to win and New Mexico didn't have enough votes to put either guy over the top. The US is too polarized and it's only getting worse. Every presidential election from now on is going to have the supporters of the losing party acting like the election was stolen from them and they were cheated. We don't need to add to the existing chaos and switch to a popular vote where the loser and their supporters are going to demand national recounts every time.
And it did so permanently. Once you become a state, you can't "unjoin", secede or leave. End of story.
Now if the government would actually start charging people with treason for saying this kind of crap and prosecute them and make them look at real jail time in a real prison, that might just put an end to it. Even former Texas governor Rick Perry was talking succession smack talk for a while. The state of Georgia passed a law 4 years ago that the current governor signed that says if the state legislature votes to nullify a federal law or executive order because they decided that it wasn't constitutional, the citizens and the state of Georgia don't have to obey said law or order. That's not succession but it's close. And the Obama administration didn't even threaten anybody over that.
At least you can get insurance.
I am very sorry to read your story. But Trump swore to repeal Obamacare. I bet it will literally be the first thing Congress votes on after he's sworn in. What gets me is that everybody I know who hates Obamacare doesn't actually depend on it. They have health insurance from work. I have one friend who is a small businessman who admitted to me that he has been much better off under the law because it drove down the cost for health insurance for him and his family, but he still voted for Trump. I'm positive the Republican plan won't work and it will be a disaster for people like your sister, but too many people who vote Republican don't care. They'll blame your sister for taking the job she did instead of working for a major corporation.
What amazes me about the whole health care thing here is the bs we heard 8 years ago about "death panels". A Republican Senator from Georgia simply asked that hospice care include counseling if needed about end of life issues and Sarah Palin turned that into Obama and the big bad Democrats want to kill your relatives by forming Death Panels to refuse to pay when you need expensive treatment to save their lives. I've got news for Republicans. Death Panels really did exist before Sarah Palin got famous. They were called insurance companies. They had lifetime maximums and could refuse to cover you if you had certain conditions. Now we're going to return to those days. They can't kill it for 2017 because Trump won't be sworn in until around Jan. 20 (forgot the exact date) and once the new year starts, you can't really take insurance away until the next calendar year. So your sister has a year to maybe find a new job with a different employers who can give her real health insurance.
If the democrats learn a single lesson from this election, it's that: Democracy is compromise. Starting a negotiation with the premise (stated stridently and repeatedly) that anyone who disagrees with your opinion is a complete and utter fucking moron doesn't make you right. It makes people hate you.
Trust me plenty of Republicans need to learn this too. One Trump supporter who is an old school friend did a share on Facebook of a post that equated voting for Hillary Clinton with Jews in WWII "willingly marching to their death". There's so much horribly horribly wrong with that on all levels that I don't even know where to begin in attacking it. Demonizing the opposition is the fault of both parties.
1) Both the Bush and Clinton crime families are finished. They will never hold any power in either side of the Ruling Party again.
Correct. Jeb Bush's failure in the primaries was the final nail in the coffin. The Bushes are now the Kennedys. I mean they can still win state elections but they're done as a national political force.
2) Trump is ego driven. He has no actual policy agenda. .
Well, he's got some. I'm pretty sure by Jan. 1, 2018 (yes 2018 - they can't kill it for 2017) that Obamacare will be permanently dead. And he may actually get advice on foreign policy from people with real experience instead of the academics I believe were constantly giving terrible advice to Obama.
3) Trey Gowdy might actually have enough integrity to prosecute criminals from both sides of the Ruling Party. Obama gave Bush's minions a walk as a professional courtesy.
It's not a big deal to me now whether or not Hillary goes to jail. Don't care either way. But some people do.
4) This defeat is an opportunity for the Democrats to clean house, big time. (Not that I really expect them to do so, but still.)
Correct. Unfortunately the Republicans need that to be done even more and that's now been put off for at least 8 years.
Twitter has been around for a decade, and some people still just don't get it, they don't understand why people use it (people love to communicate) and they don't understand how money is made (data mining and selling ad impressions)
I don't get it, but not for the reasons you listed. I understand that in theory Twitter could be useful. I argue that because people are asshats and the internet makes them even more so that Twitter will never be useful. Twitter is used mostly to insult and threaten strangers, to lie (ask anybody who follows sports writers on Twitter) and to waste time (yes, we all really must know what the Kardashians are doing 24x7). As far as making money goes, maybe you need to tell that to Twitter itself. The most recent financials I could quickly find show losses in 2015, 2014 and 2013 and there are multiple articles throughout this year talking about how nobody wants to buy Twitter because it isn't profitable. In fact their stock price got beat up in October for that very reason. Honestly I thought that by now Twitter would be like MySpace is and everybody under 24 or so would have long since abandoned it to the older folks and it would eventually die. But it turns out that young people like to insult, be lied to and follow the Kardashians as much as their parents do.
Another way of looking at it is that US workers are more exploitable. The lack of safety nets, the need for private health insurance, incredibly high student debt, lack of unions. They all work to make it easier to exploit US workers with long hours and poor conditions.
It seems like the high wages are just to cover living costs, especially in places like Silicon Valley where rents are insane. It also creates a race to the bottom where everyone is competing to work longer and harder than the next guy.
Japan and the EU have laws to prevent exploitation and limit the number of hours people can work a week, specifically to prevent all that from happening. Wages are lower but so is the cost of living. Except for the UK most students don't have massive debts, and getting sick isn't the leading cause of bankruptcy. Except for the UK, there are often rent controls too.
There's also the issue of vacation. There are always exceptions, but in general my experience is that employers in America act like mine does about vacation. My employer in general treats its employees well and as a result has had a lot of long term employees stay, but they do tend to sort of act like every vacation day you take is just killing their very soul. They are certainly not generous at all about vacation. I've worked other jobs in the USA that had much more generous vacation benefits, but those jobs had big downsides to them that my current job doesn't have, which is why I'm here. I don't have any numbers to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that the average American worker gets way less vacation than his European counterpart. I worked in the last decade in a US office of a European company and everybody everywhere in the company got really good vacation benefits.
There's a huge drive in the industry to drop costs and some startups compete with established companies simply on price. The margins are razor thin in some industries and you'd think there are already enough companies competing, but some new company will start up and offer a lower rate than ever before in the race to the bottom. I don't want to name my company, but we have competitors who start up against one tiny segment of our business every year and it's hard for me to see any real innovation. They can do what we do cheaper than us, but often they only do half of it and charge 2/3 of what charge. I've heard of customers who left us over cost to go to a startup where their stuff didn't work at all and the customer came crawling back to us after losing a ton of money trying to save money by leaving us.
There are limits to work hours in Japan and the EU, but these are routinely ignored. In Japan and South Korea employees are forced with no choice to opt out to go to long after hours drinking sessions for "team building", which is part of why there is a business in the big cities for temporary tiny hotel rooms so employees too drunk to go home can sleep it off and stagger into work the next day. On my former job I had colleagues in France who told me that they had to stay at work for at least 10 hours a day, Monday - Friday, even though it was a clear violation of French law. They told me that the final 2 hours of the day they rarely did any real work, but if they left after 8 hours management got very upset with them so they stayed late and wasted time just to get management off their backs.
Benajin Franklin quote goes here [....]
Yes, we need to remember those quotes by Benajin Franklin and those other famous founding fathers like
Tosam Jefferson
Groeg Washington
Alexnader Hamilton
Jasm Madison
Samle Adams
and others.
As far as Turkey goes, Trump is right about NATO. It is a Cold War relic, given that the membership still reflects what it was when the Soviets were the adversary. Since 2001, when Islam replaced Communism as the main enemy of the West, it makes more sense to form a new alliance of non-Muslim countries in the periphery - Russia, Israel, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Cyprus, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and some others. Maybe expand that alliance to the East to include Thailand, Philippines, Myanmar, India and Sri Lanka. But keep Turkey out!!!
I liked your suggestion of an independent Kurdistan, but I can't get on board with this one. The only thing keeping the Baltic States independent is NATO. I have no doubt that if not for NATO Putin would have already manufactured a crisis in them where ethnic Russians were supposedly at risk and used that to justify invading them. The whole reason NATO exists is to protect member states from Russian invasion. That's a real threat. Russia has even tried to intimidate Finland and Sweden, the first one especially, by warning them of the dire consequences of joining NATO. However, Russian threats to both have pushed them closer than ever to joining as his air force's fly bys have made both think that they may have to join to be protected.
Additionally your lists are well-intentioned but not likely. Ehtopia and South Sudan are of questionable stability. Cyprus is completely under the control of Turkey in the north (it invaded in the early 70s to "protect" ethnic Turks and it never left). Serbia and Russia have some bizarre ties that don't really to me make a lot of sense, but they exist nonetheless and Serbia is if anything somewhat of a Putin apologist. Greece has always been kind of iffy in NATO although they have dropped the constant anti-American bs that propped up some pretty bad governments they had in the past. Thailand is now so pro-China that their usefulness to the USA is really under question. The Philippines have a president who is either mentally ill or at best badly playing over head in a game he can't win. Myanmar is still too closely tied to China, although that may change. I'm not sure that Sri Lanka wants to do much more than focus on their own issues at the moment.
Given all the things that Erdogan has done in the wake of the 'coup', it makes me wonder whether it was actually a coup attempt, or just Erdogan's version of the Reichstag fire.
You are not alone in thinking that. As an outside observer somewhat interested in Europe in general and how Turkey relates to it, I figure either the whole thing was concocted by Erdogan to justify what followed or the coup plotters very badly underestimated the dissatisfaction with Erdogan's rule. There are plenty of people in Turkey who don't like Erdogan or what he's doing. The problem is that they're in the minority and have no power any more.
This is such a sad situation, as corporations are cashing in on the legacy of Gene Roddenberry.
Since his death, the echoes of his influence have faded. Resulting in a "Star Trek in name only" sci-fi universe.
Unfortunately there are always people like you. I'll bet you watched maybe a handful of episodes of anything not TOS or STTNG (maybe not even that) and dismissed them. Or maybe you've never seen anything after STTNG. The people I know who bitch the most in the USA about airline security are people who never, ever fly. The people who bitch the most about Trek after TOS are those who never watched it either.
As a long time fan, I can tell you that Roddenberry's influence and importance to Trek is vastly overrated. Season 3 of TOS was pretty much done with him in a caretaker role. Season 3 wasn't perfect (Spock's Brain) but it did have some really good episodes too. The Next Generation only got good after Roddenberry's influence waned due to health issues and Michael Piller basically ran things. Roddenberry had a fairly negative influence on STTNG in my opinion. He demanded rewrites that weren't necessary or better just to push his own particular vision of the future. He was kind of infamous before STTNG started for maybe being way too focused on trying to squeeze every possible dollar out of TOS, not because he loved Trek, but because he loved the money it brought. He was also kind of infamous for not paying his employees very well, which led to the situation where to avoid giving some assistant a raise he gave the guy a new job title instead and in theory made that guy the sole determiner of what was and was not Star Trek canon. That led to this guy saying that Star Trek The Animated Series was not canon, a decision still not accepted by a large number of Trek fans. Note that Roddenberry himself never said that the animated series wasn't canon. He let some dude who worked for him make the determination because it allowed him to avoid giving the guy a raise. I appreciate what he did, with some reservations, for Trek. Note that good people like David Gerrold and DC Fontana had little to no impact on STTNG because of issues either directly with Roddenberry or issues with others that he could have but chose not to resolve. Roddenberry deserves some big criticism in my opinion for the whole Gates McFadden issue where she was fired after season 1 because she complained about the sexist scripts in the season. Patrick Stewart has stated that he was shocked when she was fired because he and others on the show felt the same way about the scripts. Note that Roddenberry had a huge influence on the season 1 scripts so he was either personally responsible for a lot of what she complained about or simply did nothing to tone it down. Roddenberry may not have been the person who fired her, but he sure as hell didn't fight it and jumped at the chance to bring on his old friend Diana Muldaur to replace McFadden. McFadden returned for season 3 probably because Roddenberry's health had declined to a point where he couldn't really do anything on STTNG any more. But he deserves some praise too. He let Denis Crosby out of her contract in season 1 as a person favor to her when he didn't have to. Wil Wheaton also has very good things to say about him. It's a bit of a mixed legacy.
Just make a normal working WiFi in trains. Still in 19th century there was a direct train from Saint Petersburg to Nice via Vienna. Nowadays despite a lot of talking about European Union Association for such countries as Ukraine, it is not possible to go by train from Vienna to Kiev directly. The same as during the Cold War, nothing changed.
In the past decade I went by plane between Kiev and Vienna a decent number of times. There are probably a couple of reasons for a lack of a direct train line. One is that Ukrainians need visas to go everywhere in the EU, even next door Poland. Some former members of the Warsaw Pact made it pretty easy for Ukrainians to get visas to visit there, but once Schengen came into force, that all changed. Austria wasn't particularly easy for Ukrainians to get visas for, even before Schengen. The other is that there simply may not be that much demand for it. I've flown into Odessa, Kiev and Donnetsk (RIP Donnetsk Airport, a casualty of fighting in the east), multiple times for the first two and almost always from Vienna on those, and the planes were usually half full at best. On the flight over to Ukraine there were a few times that the plane was mostly full, but on the way to Vienna it almost never was, probably due to the visa issue. Keep in mind too that until roughly 11 years ago Ukraine required visas for just about everybody unless they lived somewhere in the former USSR. Visas were easy to get and Ukraine never had that crazy visa registration nonsense that Russia used to do to tourists, but the fact that you had to get them in advance did discourage a lot of foreigners from going there at the time. On the flights I took, most of the passengers were businessmen. There's been talk of the EU dropping visas for Ukrainians and that has finally gotten approval to negotiate the terms between the EU and Ukraine. Once that happens, the chance of a direct train line may increase. Note that Ukraine, as a former part of the old Russian Empire, uses a different gauge than western Europe, so even if a "direct" line is established, it will require a train change at a border.
Wish I had the points to mod you up. Always good to hear from a real lawyer on this kind of thing.
How would you know? Seriously, this is not trolling. How many countries has Russia invaded for profit or global politics and how many did the USA? Who used nuclear bombs on civilians? When has Russia ruled the world so that we cab compare?
It seems to me that the old-fashioned communists in Russia [and their modern day descendants] were much worse towards their population that towards foreigners, whereas USA seems to be the reverse. As I a neither American nor Russian, I prefer the Russian way.
Russia invaded Afghanistan for starters. You might have heard of that. That is the starting point for Al Queda and Daesh in so far as religious opposition to the Russian invasion led to the kind of thinking that started Al Queda and Daesh both. Osama Bin Laden got his start fighting Russians in Afghanistan. Hungary and the former Czech Republic were both essentially invaded by Soviet troops to put down liberalizing political regimes that came to power.
In the past decade I was engaged for a while to a woman in Ukraine. We didn't end up getting married and she's now married to a guy there and happy. I still have some limited few times a year contact with her. Her family was ethnically Ukrainian, born and raised in Ukraine, and in the 1930s one of her grandfathers had both of his parents killed by Stalin's henchmen for supposedly supporting Ukrainian nationalism. He was orphaned because the Russians thought his parents might want an independent Ukraine. Let me guess. I bet you are Dutch. For some reason it seems like everytime somebody here says some crap like the Russians and Americans are both super evil or "I prefer the Russians", the guy posting it is Dutch. I'm probably going to lose points for saying that, but if that wasn't true so many times I wouldn't say it.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas of the USA. Like pretty much all US metro areas, the number of people who actually live within the city limits of the major city we are named for is a lot lower than then entire metro area. Roughly 10% of the metro residents live with the city limits and 90% live outside it. In fact, the county where I live has more than double the population of the city itself, but no parts of my county are within the city limits. Google negotiated a deal with the city only in our metro area to keep their costs down. So nobody in my county can get Google fiber. The problem with Google's deal is that they didn't study the demographics here. Very roughly speaking, there are only two kinds of people who live within city limits because of outrageous property prices - the very poor and the very rich. The poor don't buy Google fiber. The rich can afford whatever they want to pay so there's no real reason for them to get Google fiber unless they really want to. Google advertises a surprising amount on local TV. Well, I'd love to be a customer, Google, but you didn't want to deal with my county, so you're out of luck. Maybe if you had instead offered it to my entire county instead of only the metro's city limits, you'd have had more business. Believe me, many of us would love to leave Comcast and AT&T but they are the only games where we live.
Actually, both the US and Russian people downplay the role the other played. The average US person acts like the US did 99% of the work in WWII, the UK maybe did 1% but they can't remember their old high school history exactly to be sure of that, and nobody else was even in the war for the Allies, right? On the Russian side, they act like the US, UK, Canada and whoever else were just playing cards on the beach until the Russians marched into Berlin and ended everything.
The actually reality is that Russia had some smart generals, but that was almost by blind luck because paranoid "Uncle Joe" Stalin had actually killed off a rather large part of the Russian Amy's leadership by the time the sneak German invasion happened. The Russians are lucky that a few good ones somehow survived. A lot of the Russian "tactics" involved just throwing large numbers of troops at the Nazis and overwhelming them by sheer numbers. I don't want to suggest that there wasn't any better planning than this or there weren't legitimate victories by just outsmarting the Nazis, but in some cases the Russians simply had the numbers. A small part of their strategy at times involved suicidal attacks that seemingly didn't lack for volunteers, which was something the Germans weren't willing to do. Suicide bombers willingly blew up tanks for example. And I think it's fair to state that in general the Nazis didn't put their best on the Eastern front and the Russians sometimes faced poorly trained and equipped troops from places like Romania and Hungary instead of solid Nazi troops. It took longer in the west to march to Berlin because of geography and better Nazi troops. I agree with you that lend-lease is hugely overrated for the "help" it provided to the Russians and arguably it's biggest "accomplishment" was that Stalin ordered his boys to disassemble some plane (I don't remember which one) they got that ended up providing the basis for a huge jump in their aviation industry and had some impact on the Korean War where Russian pilots pretended to be either Chinese or North Korean pilots and unofficially flew for both of those countries.
Yeah, it's unreal how many posts in my feed I get pushing a pro-Trump agenda, even from people who I know that I never in any way respond to anything they post. In fact, the crazier the post, it seems like it makes more likely to get a big push from Facebook. I remain appalled by a post a former classmate shared from another person who equated voting for Hillary Clinton to be identical to being a Jew "willingly" matching to the Nazi gas chambers in WWII. No joke. I have a policy that I don't post political stuff in my account and I almost never respond to what others post, but that is just so appealingly wrong that it amazes me that people actually don't think at all about what they pass on that others say. I see stuff constantly from right wing friends who post insisting that the US is teetering on the edge of disaster and that if Hillary Clinton becomes president it is GAME OVER for the USA. Apparently Facebook has some trending news stories section that I never use but enough people do use and that's where the shaping of articles was going on.
A couple of years ago I was in a relationship with a lady who lied throughout our relationship. She told one fairly big lie in the beginning and got caught and I forgave her and gave her another chance. My reward for this was that she continued to lie to me about various things. It just took a lot longer to figure that out. In fact, I'd say that her default position on just about anything was to lie about it. She just had a lot of issues and I guess she was afraid that even the smallest issue would be a major problem for me, so she continued to lie. In the end I caught her in very big and longstanding lie that completely destroyed my ability to trust her ever again and also brought to light many other related lies that she had told to support the big lie, so our relationship ended. In the end I was left not really knowing what, if anything, she had ever told me was true. It really brought home to me the idea that trust is the foundation for a relationship and when there is no trust, there can't be a successful relationship.
It really doesn't matter if this is true or not. Either way, it won't be fixed in time. The bottom line reality is that Russia, China, Brazil and India simply don't care. China does care a little but only a little. None of them are going to reduce emissions if it harms economic growth. They've all been clear that they think it's unfair that the more developed countries who got there faster got to pollute all they wanted to with no consequence in the past. So everybody should really hope that the climate change folks are mistaken because this is simply not solvable with those 4 at a minimum being unwilling to do anything about it.
There is starting to be some pushback in some places over this. St. Louis refused to subsidize a new stadium and they don't have an NFL team any more. Currently in MLB, the Arizona Diamondbacks are demanding that the county where their stadium is located either build them a new stadium or pay for upgrades on the current one so costly that they might as well just build a new stadium. The county is calling their bluff and telling them that they'd rather lose the team than pay even for the upgrades and the Diamondbacks are threatening to move, but nobody knows if there even is anywhere that wants them.
OK, ,I admit that his weird popularity is just one of those strange, unpredictable things that happens. I don't think it was part of any great plan that went any further than trying to maximize his chance of getting allowed to ask a question on TV. But why is nobody questioning Bone's claim that he's still somehow "undecided"? I mean, I guess it's possible, but he's probably just about the only person who is. And exactly how much more info does he need to make up his mind? At this point everybody has not only made up their mind but they're hardening their positions and no more future revelations of misconduct on either side are likely to get people to change their vote. I honestly don't know a single person who has told me that they don't know who they are going to vote for. I know a lot of people who are really unhappy with who they are going to vote for, but I don't know anybody who still can't come to a decision about it. And yes, these FCC "guidelines" are pure crap.