Re: "President Trump’s reasoning..."
Except when he is "interacting" with Russian prostitutes who are definitely not wearing training pants.
238 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2019
And by the same token, if male, white, European-descended individuals were to be over-represented in a project while being no better qualified than any of the other groups, action should perhaps be taken to redress that imbalance because it might suggest that prejudice was present in the hiring process. "Standards" often seem to be things which decide who's on the inside and who's on the outside and the objectivity of the criteria for the standard seem, well ... as solid as soup.
Ok, so to be fully factually correct Musk is an African American Canadian, holding citizenship and passports for all three nations.
I suspect the downvotes are more to do with 1) you are potentially so ignorant that you do not know the difference between the continent of Africa and the country of South Africa or 2) that calling Musk an African American is the kind of cheap, arrogant, supercilious offensiveness in which Musk and his bell-end followers indulge.
I would describe him as an Afrikaner Nazi rather than a South-African American Canadian, but to each to their own. It is true that, at least for the moment, you cannot get citizenship or a passport for being a "rich, racist wankstain". Were it possible, I would grant him such citizenship and issue his passport myself.
Well, an Afrikaner American for sure. There is little doubt that right-wing white Americans and right-wing white Afrikaners have a lot in common. They own almost everything -- land, wealth, resources -- but claim against all evidence that they are being subjected to a "genocide".
>americans need to take some shared responsibility for this shit-show.
Why would they suddenly start now? The people they have elected for decades and decades, regardless of symbol or colour, have overthrown democratic governments all over the world (often creating all by themselves the US's most trenchant enemies), provided the logistics or actively participated in the massacre of the opponents of dictatorial regimes in their tens if not hundreds of thousands, without even a scintilla of an idea of legality, bombed weddings, baptisms and funerals, "set" and increased the number of entirely innocent people who it was OK kill to take out an entirely "extra-judicial" target, and generally pursued an America First policy while at the same time bloviating about freedom, leading the free world, opposing "barbarity" and all the rest of the utterly baseless, rhetorical bollocks they've been spouting since pretty the foundation of their country. A tiny, nasty part of me wants to say, your government has been doing it to others since forever, so why would any of us care if they have now turned it on their own citizens? My better part says it is not too late for US citizens to realise where things went wrong and elect people who would simply narrow the gap between the reality and the rhetorical bollocks. In any case, regardless of what I think, I doubt the US will be much of a "superpower" ten years from now, any more than Russia is today. The future is gloomy; the future is probably Chinese.
>Or when the Luddites insisted machinery would permanently wipe out employment?
No, I don't remember that. Maybe because I studied actual history, not what gets continually repeated as it provides suitable propaganda for a certain way of looking at society. The Luddites insisted no such thing. They insisted that machinery was being used to undermine their control over their own time and labour through centralisation of production and power and that it would further extend the already huge gap in the balance of power between them and the textile merchants become factory owners. They insisted that the uses to which the new technology was being put would not be in their best interests but in the interests of a small elite who would have ever more control and ever more of the profits of their labour. They were, go figure, quite right. Where does this naive idea that technology springs out of thin air come from? What directions technologies take (even what basic research is prioritised), how they are used, what is pursued and what dropped, how implementations are chosen, all these decisions take place within the social, economic and political power relations of a given, existing society. Alternatives to the centralised factory - which handed all power to capital and reduced labour to a mere commodity - were proposed at the time. That they were squashed by the rich elite of merchants become the only owners of the means of production is not a surprise and not something which is directly derived from the technology at all.
>Predicting what may happen in the next hundred years or so and preparing for it seems like a pretty good idea to me.
You are right. But the problem is not what is happening and what may happen. The problem is the why and what that means for huge vested interests who believe *they* can survive whatever that what is and really don't care whether anyone else does.
Fairly sure that he has no intention of having to do anything as demeaning as *running* for his third term. I think he expects it handed to him on a plate by slobbering lackeys without any democratic "fluff" involved. The way the US looks from the outside these days, that seems far from unlikely.
I don't think an AI would accept the job of replacing Scott Bessent. Firstly, it would be ashamed to replace someone that fucking dumb; and secondly, it would probably object to licking Trump's arsehole all the time. If only ... If only AI was *actually* intelligent. It's as dumb as the President of the US. If only anyone in the Trump cabinet displayed even a *modicum* of intelligence. It is sort of amusing though to watch the US President drawling with all the articulacy of a totally drunk chimpanzee while calling highly qualified young black women "low IQ".
Whereas they absolutely love the billions in subsidies provided to the fossil fuels companies who use that to lower leccy bills... Oh, that's right they don't use their taxpayer-provided subsidies to lower leccy bills for their customers but to pay out dividends and ludicrously high C-suite compensation while blaming renewables for their gouging. It's a great gig for the grifters whose predecessors commissioned the studies showing just how much they were fucking the planet and then chose to use taxpayers' money to fund a decades-long campaign of disinformation and water-muddying! Trebles all round!
Fancy having an uncomplimentary picture of Donald Trump up somewhere. I do hope you are not in the US or the congregation are likely to end up on planes to El Salvador for such expressions of opinion, shorn of any legal due process. But, then there's harm and harm isn't there? Recognising and judging real harm is one of the problems we have isn't it -- as many people appear to have pretty solid blinkers about what harms they are willing to consider.
>Then stop foaming, calm yourself and see if you can muster a valid response.
OK, please describe what happened on 6th January 2020. You are not allowed to say that the masked and armed people smashing the doors and windows of the US Capitol were "enthusiastic" tourists or "ANTIFA agents provocateurs" while they were shouting Trump's name (you can look up what an agent provocateur means if you manage; I know it's a "foreign language"); you are not allowed to say that all the video is deep-state fake as they show Trump supporters baseball-batting police; you are not allowed to simply dismiss hundreds of court cases, tried by jury, which convicted people, pardoned subsequently by Trump, of violent felonies. You are not allowed to whatabout shite about things which have nothing to do with the above. "The Dems done worse. They illegally suppressed the Confederate State of America! The courts are all Dem-controlled (when a majority of federal judges and the vast majority of the Supreme Court of the US have been appointed by Republicans). But of course, what you will do is just wank off over your picture of "the Donald" needlessly in public. I urge you to take the high road and jizz off your authoritarian fantasies in the privacy of your bathroom. No need to share.
>“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
>Biden is sharp as a tack. Running rings around his staffers.
Indeed, Trump isn't a deranged loony who understands as much about making deals as he understands about how he managed to lose all Daddy's money, bankrupts casinos, could not run an airline, could not sell fucking steaks for God's sake (I know 20 shops within a kilometre of me which have sold more steaks than Donald -- the Art of the Deal -- Trump), created a fraudulent university which was actually a shite fraud and got busted real old cue-ee-wick. Still, I can understand why you would like the guy. But could you please stop wanking on the guy in public; it's a little unseemly, even for a spunk coder. Sorry, junk coder.
A lot more police shoot at unarmed people than people shoot at them. They are apparently petrified for their lives almost continuously so shoot unarmed people through doors, pump the wrong apartments full of lead and kill the inhabitants in their beds. Amazing how much of the collateral damage is unarmed black people. I mean, the police routinely talk down you white shooters, it happens all the time no matter how violent they are. Apparently unarmed black people petrify the US police and white racists armed with AR-15s are little more than a menace.
>We knew this was the case two or three months ago
Absolutely, so everyone should shut up and leave them to gut the constitution, the rule of law and the separation of powers. YAY! I always knew the right's defence of the constitution was so much shite, but seeing how wide they are pulling their arses open (no lube allowed) and how much Trump cum they are willing to swallow is nonetheless the educational. [Likely to be moderated because the idea that right-wing scumbags lack any kind of reasonable moral framework is apparently now a controversial idea no matter what they say and do.]
>Americans produce and export things they do better
What would those be? I am not aware of anything worthwhile that the USA produces or exports. It produces dogshit food, pestilential poultry, mangy gmo-modified beef, and one of the unhealthiest populations of the planet. It exports coups d'etats against democractically elected governments (for close to a century), wars, violence and suffering. If there is anything else it might possibly be anti-democratic surveillance, extra-judicial murders, drone executions, food products and just to be sure ludicrously over-priced shite and US-controlled IT services. Whoo-hoo. Did we really need those fucking "exports"? They are a fucking liability. No country in their right mind wants to be associated with the US (or indeed Europe, whose approach isn't actually that different). Which is why China is the state hoovering up infrastructure and development projects all over the developing world (despite what we all know). How many times do you get shafted before you realise? You will always be the shaftee but munchkin Americans and Europeans claim they are honest, open and your friend. As they shaft you again! What the world needs to do is stop being shafted by the US, Russia, China, Europe and take them out. They are incapable of producing anything worthwhile in any arena: basics materials, basic industries, commercial products, IP, infrastructure, a future for humanity.
There isn't a queue. Never has been. Membership may not have been guaranteed, but Scotland already met almost all of the requirements for membership and more than some Eastern European countries when the British government pushed successfully for their membership on the basis they would move towards meeting those they did not currently meet. I guess you don't really understand anything about the EU.
>This is all straight out of Trump's book, The Art of the Deal.
A book he did not even write and which we know he doesn't really understand. If you want to know how Trump "negotiates" just look at the way he lay down in front of Putin over Ukraine, throwing away cards before the negotiations even started! And we definitely know he gets things done; he bankrupts casinos, racks up huge debts with small contractors and then stiffs them, lied to and defrauded Deutsche Bank (not that they are any better than he is in the bigger picture) and the list goes on. Here's how he operates: he inherited a huge amount of money and lost quite a lot of it, most of it really; he played a savvy entrepreneur in front of the camera for a scripted reality TV programme where he was made to look clever(ish) by the producers and managed to expand this performance to the US political stage (not surprising given how much you have allowed moneyed interests to gut the independence of every single branch your government). Your idea of what seems to be going on is, frankly, delusional.
They've largely been "caught out" by trying to turn their universities into businesses instead of seats of learning. They have overpaid "CEOs", make ludicrously risky investments in activities entirely unrelated to the pursuit of knowledge and education, and have piled lots of money they don't really have into extremely expensive property developments. They have de-skilled and demoralised their "workforce" (most academics can no longer both teach and do research -- research grants and time are extremely circumscribed and driven by imperatives which have nothing to do with scholarly endeavour or a wish to extend knowledge). It is not the ceiling for fees which is the problem, it is the fundamental misunderstanding of how learning for learning's sake contributes to the progress of a free and vibrant society. When you instrumentalise and commodify *everything*, you lose the ability to see things in new ways, challenge orthodoxies, innovate, err, go off on a tangent. Our governments turned universities and other learning institutions into factories producing qualifications which would "guarantee" a better position in the labour market. They totally failed to deliver even that philistine result.
>Margret Thatcher phrased it nicely “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”
Ah, yes, the milk snatcher. Who initiated the flogging off of public goods, services and properties on the cheap to the capitalists who funded (and still fund) the Conservative Party. Who extracted money while providing absolutely shit (literally in the case of the water companies) services. Who flogged council houses to people who couldn't afford them so her banking buddies could take both their money and eventually their houses and move them on to rentier landlords. A thief and parasite who knew loads about taking other people's money but sod all about socialism.
Warren Buffett phrased it nicely: "There's class warfare, all right. But it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning.”
A few months ago, you could simply accept only functional cookies on ElReg. Now, you have the full panoply of invasive popup yes/no choices. What is even more interesting if we wish to understand the ElReg publisher's motivation, is that you can agree to have them store required cookies simply for information (such as your choice in this regard - as little as possible thank you). Apparently the publishers of ElReg these days are too fucking greedy to accept that I turned off as much of their tracking as I could, and asked them to remember that I turned it off. So every time I get the same twatty dialogues as if the morons are too stupid to accept the decisions I already made. They are not too really too stupid, of course, it is a choice on their part, to milk information.
An Israeli intelligence official who spoke to the Guardian newspaper admitted that they had identified 37,000 militant "targets" using AI software, that they were willing to accept civilian casualties of 15 to 20 civilians for each of their AI-identified targets and that they preferred the cheapest method which was to take down tan entire building with dumb munitions where it was just suspected that there might be some of their targets, regardless of who or how many civilians were killed. The people who Palantir sells its systems to would rather keep their genocide cost effective than end total and indiscriminate war.
>the traditional and unique peaceful transfer of power that has been the hallmark of the US for over 200 years
You really think the peaceful transfer of power is unique to the US? The whole American exceptionalism bit which underlies this ridiculous claim is probably why the US has been enabling violent transfers of power all over the world almost since its inception.
>Universities never listen to their own experts
The problem is very few entities of any kind now listen to their own experts (presuming they have not already eliminated all their experts). Banks, universities, local authorities, infrastructure companies. None of them listen to anything except the siren call of maximum profit extraction. The society we have built is a dead end of meaningless accumulation; unfortunately, it is a dead end which is likely to end our existence as species.
> the staff are often under-trained or don't have the authority to actually do anything to resolve problems
I worked in a bank call centre briefly in the 1990s. We were handling what was basically a Xmas savings account product. The customers were trying to get their money out in time for Xmas and the bank seemed to be doing its utmost to thwart that. Instead of repeating the scripted responses and chucking the case on the already huge pile of issues to resolve, I actually resolved the issues (it wasn't that hard, even though we were not really set up to do it). Obvious why my period of employment there was brief ;-)