Posts by veti 4492 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Mar 2010
That's 76 million human beings you're talking about.
They're not going anywhere. They've nowhere to go. They may not be a majority, but whoever tries to govern America had better reach *some* accommodation with them, because the alternative is a more competent version of Trump taking power.
I wouldn't. I'm fine with "domestic terrorism" including representatives of both left and right.
But that's nothing to do with the point of my post, which was that your post seemed to be intent on blaming last week's events on "antifa". Which is only really possible if you define "antifa" as including "anyone who engages in political violence, including those whom the president describes as 'very fine people' and 'patriots'", and I suspect that isn't your intention.
If you think it should be illegal for political campaigns to request opposition research from foreigners, then you go right ahead and campaign for that change to be made to the law. I assume the Republicans who originally commissioned the "dossier" would be fine with it.
Just so long as it's the law for everyone, not just for one side, I'd have no quarrel with it.
Though I think, for fairness' sake, you should also make sure the law covers the case if someone requests similar information using the office of the presidency and US federal funds already duly voted through Congress as leverage. I'd call that a much worse crime myself, but what do I know.
Warren Harding was a forerunner of Trump in many ways. He busied himself with golf, poker and... ladies who were mostly not his wife, while his friends plundered the treasury through a series of scandals that kept unravelling for years after his death.
He did, however, have a glimmer of self-awareness. "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here," he reportedly said, before having the good taste to die in office.
All i said was that Trump would be back to pretty much the same role he played in the Obama years...
I didn't think much of Obama as a president. He had some big failures - most notably, when he refused to pardon Ed Snowden - but on the whole, he was OK. But Trump never stopped carping and complaining that everything he did was uniquely awful, and that's pretty much the line he'll return to in two weeks.
The evidence from Australia and New Zealand is now quite incontrovertible. Once the virus is gone, the economy will rebound without even needing further expensive stimulus.
But until then, it won't. As long as people are reluctant to spend lots of time mixing with others, your economy will remain in the crapper.
You want the recession over? Distribute the vaccine. Quickly.
Delay, as we know, is the deadliest form of denial. And all delay happens one day at a time.
They were asking Tuberville to buy them a day because they thought that was the best they could hope for from him. Not because they had a plot that would hatch in that time, but because - you win one day here, one day there, and it soon adds up.
I'm sure the people storming the capitol had all sorts of deranged fantasies, and yes, surely Trump shared some of them. But always in Trump's mind there is something else: fear. Trump isn't going to be the one to overthrow American democracy, because that would take actual courage. That's why he's backpedalling furiously now, because he's terrified he may have gone too far and exposed himself to real legal danger.
Since he doesn't have an AG to advise him any more, and he (wisely) has doubts about Giuliani's judgment...
So yeah. If he could do it without risk, I think he'd be game for anything. But he can't. You need to worry about a potential despot with actual guts, as well as Trump's uncanny knack for riling up both parties' bases. I don't know who that could be - clearly it's possible one might come along, and if you could think of any safeguards to build that would stop them, this would be an excellent time to propose them. But equally clearly, Trump isn't the guy who'll do that.
Clearly, Trump is going to retire to Florida, surround himself with some sort of "shadow cabinet", and spend the next four years reminding everyone how he won really but was ousted by a deep state coup. So he'll attack everything the government does and remind everyone how much better he'd do it.
Much like Obama's two terms, really.
You're forgetting: whatever else Trump is, he's also a massive coward.
That's why his most recent tweets are all positively designed to be read out in court when he's charged with sedition.
Pressing "the Button" would no doubt be fun, but it would also expose him personally to considerable danger. He's not going to do that.
Trump's real blunder this time was, he made the politicians - including his own party - feel physically threatened. They are not, on the whole, very brave people, and they will not forgive being scared like that.
That's why even those Republicans who've had his back all this time are now suddenly discovering what he has been all along. (Well, that and the good voters of Georgia have seriously damaged his mystique as a base whisperer.) Altogether, he very suddenly finds himself with many fewer friends, and that emboldens others to finally act against him.
No, the issue is a little thing called Section 230, which ironically Trump has been pushing to repeal lately. And he was right to do so. Even Trump espouses good causes sometimes, albeit for the worst reasons.
Section 230 creates a legal anomaly whereby online publishers, like Facebook, Twitter and Google, get to pretend to be like "common carriers" - who are agnostic to the content they deliver - but, and this is the key point, they don't actually have to be anything of the sort. They get all the control and power of a publisher, but none of the legal responsibility.
I don't think this is either healthy or sustainable. Companies need to decide whether they want to be publishers or platforms - the two roles are not the same, and shouldn't be conflated. (Of course some, like Google, might try offering both services - but they would have to keep them separate.) Then, and only then, can we hold publishers to account properly.
Exactly how much experience do you have in the commercial cleaning business? How much time do you spend in schools?
995 bottles is a lot of bleach, yes, but bleach is not even remotely suitable for most of the surfaces in that environment.
And even if it were, you'd still have to pay someone to spray and wipe it on everything.
Soldiers are paid to be ready and willing to fight. That's what they do most of the time. Actually going into action abroad is extra.
That's the way it's always been, except that in medieval times only the nobility (officers) would have got any bonuses. Now at least it's shared a bit more evenly.
Fewer than 5 million Americans watch Fox News, according to Nielsen. You're going to have to find someone else to blame for the other 48%.
And whatever they plan about the next election, the pandemic has already cost them the last election. If that was deliberate, then it's backfired hugely. Unless it was a plan by the Republican establishment to get rid of Trump, of course. Almost like... a conspiracy?
The services are censored, yes, but they were created by the commercial pressures of the free unregulated Internet. They're censored because they choose to be that way. And people choose to use them anyway.
Just like any fully unregulated market eventually tends to monopoly, but on the Internet of course it happens faster.
The free Internet has given us Facebook and Twitter and Google and Amazon. Are you sure that's the best it can be?
1%, if the figure truly is that low (and I'd love to see some hard numbers on that), can still do a tremendous amount of damage. The number of people who abuse guns or poison is lower than that, but we still regulate them.
Yes, ranting always makes you look like a jerk. But keep in mind we're only getting one side of the story here. For all we know, the client had been fighting a running battle with IT for months to get the modem mounted somewhere more secure, and they'd been fighting all the way.
I'm not saying this or anything like it happened. Just that it *could* have happened. And if it had, then even if the narrator was privy to the whole saga, they still wouldn't have mentioned it when telling this story.
Solarwinds didn't "have a better view of events", because the malware explicitly checked whether it was running on a Solarwinds machine, and if it was, would quietly terminate itself without doing anything. That made it harder for them to spot it than another sophisticated networking company.
The trouble with companies watching each other is that it's just another form of trust, and it can be abused just like every other form. It might work for a while, but sooner or later one of the participants will get a sociopathic CEO, and it'll all be over.
Yes, and the Sealander government has an excellent track record of standing up for privacy of people who aren't even sure it exists... </sarcasm>
Sealand exists, in so far as it's a real thing at all, on sufferance. It exists solely because destroying it once and for all would look bad. To maintain that sufferance, it needs to not be a pain in the arse to its host country. It carefully avoids drawing official attention to itself.
The CARES act was quoted as $2.2 trillion, this new measure is listed at 0.9 trillion. (Mitt Romney claims the actual cost is less than half of that, as most of the money is repurposed from CARES, not new.)
Let’s call it $3 trillion, divided by 300 million Americans. That works out around $10,000 each.
What the article doesn’t mention is that the $600 is the allowance for everyone who earns less than $75000. If you’re unemployed, the benefit is a rather more substantial $300 per week.
It’s been a peculiarity of the Republicans that they persist in seeing the pandemic as, essentially, an economic crisis rather than anything to do with health. Hence the use of words like “stimulus”, rather than “relief”, and the focus on general handouts rather than supporting people who actually need it. But it’s been obvious for more than six months now that the only realistic way to revive the economy is to get the pandemic under control. Until then, relief is the best you can hope for.
Doesn't add up. The original indictment was delivered in November 1991, some nine months after the liberation of Kuwait.
And Iran took no part in that action. Of course they could have made it harder by supporting Iraq, but since they cordially loathed the Iraqi regime after 8 years of war, it hardly seems likely.
It's also not clear just what they could have done. Since the coalition very pointedly didn't try to occupy Iraq at the time, they didn't leave a lot of targets for an insurgent campaign to strike. The Iranians would never have considered supporting the Iraqis in battle, nor would either side have expected (or trusted) them to provide logistical support.
Historically true because the USA is bigger and stronger, but becoming less true year on year. It's lost a lot of ground lately, particularly due to Trump's bizarre belief in unilateralism, which basically pissed away the US's biggest strategic advantage - its level of respect and goodwill among other rich countries.
Nope. If Pompeo had a future in any kind of political circles, it was among those who think Trump was the greatest president since Julius Caesar. If anything, he's damaged his own future prospects in that line.
Nobody in the Biden administration is going to be asking for his advice, that I'm sure of.
False. Wisconsin's turnout in the presidential election was about 72.3%, which is high but not unprecedented.
Among other states with same day voter registration, Missouri had 70% turnout, Illinois 73%, California (which nobody would call a swing state) 80%, Utah - a deeply Republican state, administered entirely by Republicans and nobody for a moment expecting it to swing - had 90%.
I suggest you take a look at how your red flags get triggered, because someone in your feedline has been telling malicious lies.
This is just plain Luddism. To maintain that coal is the only realistic way of generating the bulk of your electricity flies in the face of the last 40 years of development.
Here on Planet Earth, coal is already well below 40% of global electricity production, and dropping year on year.
Diplomatic immunity is not and never has been, realistically, negotiable.
The UK can, of course, repudiate its extradition treaty with the US, become a safe haven for American criminals. If you think that sounds like a good idea, go ahead and campaign for it. Short of that, though, we should all hope that courts will continue to apply the law with some show of honesty and impartiality.
I fondly remember a physics teacher who showed us all exactly what happens when you try to put out an oil fire with water.
There was a whole catechism of follow up questions, one of which was "so what would happen if I used this bucket of sand, instead?"
He showed us that, too. By the time he finished, we all realised that "being completely bald" was actually a mark of extreme cool.
I hate to say it, but Facebook's counsel does make a good point. The FCC already heard all these arguments about WhatsApp and the other thing, and dismissed them. Facebook has by now spent billions of dollars on the basis that WhatsApp belongs to it. It does seem unreasonable to say "no, we got that wrong, and now we're going to punish you for our fuckup".
Of course that doesn't address all the complaints. But it's a good point that needs addressing. Why did the FCC do its job so badly, and doesn't it now owe something to those who have built businesses and careers on the basis of its previous decision?
I don't know about you, but my computer has almost nothing but "untrusted code from outside" running on it.
About the only really trusted code is what I've written myself, which is a very small part of the system. And even that is dependent on the other stuff doing what I think it will.
Javascript that runs on your system is, in principle, reviewable, and therefore as trustworthy as anything you can run from outside your own system. Of course you never do review it in practice, but that's also true of all that open-source software you're putting your trust in.
You can fuck up in any language of your choice. And compilation isn't any kind of magic bullet, either. Remember "if it compiles, ship it"?
I wrote my first Javascript in 1999, which from this article makes me feel like an early adopter, although it was already pretty ubiquitous by then. It was a personality quiz that took a user's selections, did a bit of scoring, and gave a popup with their result. All good fun. But what was revolutionary about it, for me, was that I didn't need to run any code on the server, meaning I didn't have to pay extra for the hosting - everything happened in the browser.
I think we may owe it partly to Javascript that you can now download and use so many languages, compilers and IDEs for free. 25 years ago, people charged for those things.
The H1B is an invitation to abuse, and it's not surprising that it is abused. The whole system should simply be abolished.
But that's not the issue here. This judgment is about whether the pandemic justifies rushing the change through as an emergency measure, rather than allowing for Congress and others to debate it.
Nobody ever thought it would stand. As the judge notes, it's already been thrown out once, and nobody put much work into updating the justification this time. The only reason Trump attempted it was that he loves it when the courts shoot him down, it lets him pose as a populist outsider, rather than the utterly corrupt kleptocrat that he is.
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