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Patch reliability is unclear, but widespread attacks make patching prudent. Go ahead and patch, but watch out for potential problems. |
I’m temporarily removing the ban on political commentary, but only on this comment thread, in honor of Brad’s decision.The ban on swearing and religious talk remains intact.
[See the full post at: Brad Smith, MS chief legal officer, leaves US Commerce Dept’s Digital Economy Board of Advisors]
Not a big political or ideological person. I don’t get caught up in the divisiveness of a minority of people who are extreme in views. Most America goes on with life without concern of statues or bathroom types or anything else. Other then making a living, paying bills, taxes, and providing for a family. I also believe having a voice is more important then walking away in protest. You can only walk away once and make your point. A voice can carry on over time injecting your viewpoint. Its why we have a Congress full of people who give their voice power. How would it be if you were a congressional representative and you lost one vote so you just walked away? I think Brad Smith made a mistake by leaving and note providing a voice, even if he felt it was not heard.
It’s a tough decision, but so many people have reached the point of “Enough already.”
You’re absolutely right about most people just carrying on, in spite of the political situation. It’s easy to be engulfed by the hopelessness of it all.
I do hope that America is able to find its way back from the abyss of global embarrassment it stands in currently. As an outsider it saddens me to see a once proud nation become such a laughing stock the world over. The departure of a number of important advisers to the administration is just one symptom of the present malaise. It’s difficult to see where it will all end but it doesn’t look good at the moment, that’s for sure, and ordinary citizens who think it doesn’t affect them won’t be able to ignore it for too much longer.
Woody, the next time you are thinking about making an exception to the “no politics” rule, take a deep breadth and exhale slowly. Then don’t do it!
Woody warned you up front that he was allowing political comments in this thread only. Why did you read the comments if you didn’t want to read political opinions?
What?! No swearing allowed!?
%#¤&#¤!
But seriously… watching the US political scene from the other side of the pond is a depressing sight…
Waiting for mr. Muller and the two grand jurys to finish the job… the sooner the better this farce is finished.
As I see it, mr. Pence will fall too, so the future looks bright, but who’s next in line to take over then? Mr. Ryan?
“One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.
There is no absolute knowledge and those who claim it, whether they are scientist or dogmatist, open the door to tragedy. All knowledge, all information is imperfect. We have to treat it with humility.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known; we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.”
— Jacob Bronowski, “The Ascent of Man” (1973): Episode 11, “Knowledge or Certainty.”
“Maybe, the liberal leftwing counter-protesters at Charlottsville purposely attacked and provoked the neo-Nazi to later ram his car into the liberals/leftwingers, in order to evoke public sympathy for the liberals, as per the liberals’ playbook.”
Would this be the same way that a wife provokes her abusive husband to murder her by talking back when he clearly told her to shut up? Or perhaps it’s more like the young girl in a revealing dress who provokes a guy to beat and rape her, by rudely spurning his advances? Maybe it’s really more like the young man who got shot on the freeway because of a gesture to the pickup driver who cut him off?
“… I’m not trying to justify the neo-Nazi’s copycat terrorist act.”
But you absolutely are trying to justify it. And it’s the most horrific type of insidious, disgusting, reprehensible false equivalency imaginable. No one can “make” someone murder someone else. People either possesses that level of hate and disregard for others, coupled with poor impulse control, or they don’t.
If you can’t control yourself when someone comes face-to-face with you to express a different viewpoint or if you can’t tolerate women, racial/ethnic minorities, and gays and lesbians who don’t know their place, then just stay home. Because we’re everywhere.
It wasn’t received as intended. This move looks childish to many with strong ax to grind. It smells of Silly Valley pouting because Trump doesn’t view them as the saviors of mankind (they aren’t) and what they want is not necessarily in the best interests of the country as a whole.
NO comment. I have an opinion, but it is mine and I will keep it that way because everyone has an opinion. They are great for sharing/discussing with people in your life (of like mind or not) because they know you and either understand, or give you the benefit of the doubt.
Everybody has to believe in something (even if it’s nihilism), and so I believe I’ll pour myself a wee dram of scotch.
jimzdoats
Och, aye laddie. Will The Macallan Cask Strength do? Ah couldna find the Old Sheep Dip.
jimzdoats
Aye, The Macallan Cask Strength will do quite nicely, thank ye. If for some reason it proves too hard to come by, then The Balvenie DoubleWood should more than suffice. Why, if need be, I’m sure that we could even settle for The Glenlivet (20 y.o., of course).
Ah do hae a wee bit o th’ Balvenie, e’en if it were a Dufftown cask. Th’ fine lowland Scotch has worn a warm spot in me heart/gullet. As a Scot, the price has been a keen interest in me own investments. Used to be tha’ the Balvenie was a fine $30 bottle; now it’s gone into the Strathosphere at $50.
I’m liking the local Rye Whiskies a whole lot more than afore. Try the Templeton at >$30; but be sure to try the Redemption Rye at Trader Joe’s for $27. It be a fine whisky fer the price.
As fer The Macallan at any date, -ouch!
jimzdoats
Whiskey? Meet my cousin Jack… you can call him Mr. Daniels…. Lives just up the road. The Low Road, perhaps.
Old No. 7: “Charcoal mellowed, drop by drop.” I’m looking at the bottle now, over on the shelf (just looking; it may be five o’clock somewhere, but it’s still coffee time here in the Pacific Time Zone).
(Incidentally, a snifter works well for Mr. Jack, too.)
Companies didn’t leave the Obama administration because the Obama Administration didn’t refuse condemn white supremacists and Nazis. At some point, everyone has a line. Plus. when everyone is leaving, you have a bit of cover, similar to a strike.
Given how little influence they actually had on Trump’s policies, it makes sense not to want to take the PR hit of being the company that stuck with Trump during this time.
It does get frustrating when people try to equate Trump and Obama, or literally any other President. Trump is an authoritarian nationalist populace who apparently won’t even condemn white supremacy. He’s constantly at war with the free press. That alone should be enough to worry people: That’s fascism. The good thing is that he’s not good at it, because he acts like some misanthropic grandpa who only gets his news and politics from TV. And he has a huge temper problem. The bigger threat is that he’ll do something really really stupid.
Point is, this isn’t politics as usual, so expecting the same responses that past presidents has does not make sense. No matter what problems you had with Obama, he believed in democracy and was mentally competent enough to have complex ideas. He deftly navigated racial tensions. No matter what problems you had with Bush, he was, at his core, a good guy who wanted to help people and cared about this country. No matter what problem you had with Bill Clinton, he was a smart dealmaker who realized the tensions in the South. Bush Sr. was just a brilliant man. And even if you think Reagan was unqualified, he at least listened to those on his staff who knew more than him. He genuinely cared. And I could go on.
I applaud these guys for standing up against Trump. Maybe the only thing we can do is show that America doesn’t stand with him, to help minimize the damage he can do. A lot of power of the president is based on his ability to get people to work with him, and Trump can’t seem to do this. Nothing is thrown away because everyone after Trump is going to want to distance themselves from him–even Republicans (in Congress) see Trump as a liability now.
Math: According to the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan service of the US Congress, there were 225 million American citizens who were age 18 or older as of last November’s election day and not criminally convicted felons and therefore eligible to vote, if registered, in last year’s federal elections. According to the official certified results in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the Democrat party candidate got a little less than 66 million votes and the Republican party candidate got just shy of 63 million votes; and about 136.5 million people voted. 88.5 million people didn’t vote even though they were eligible to vote; but 25 million eligible voters weren’t even registered to vote for reasons of their own (it’s remarkable how many eligible voters won’t register to vote for personal legal reasons, such as outstanding warrants, failure to appear for jury duty, unpaid back taxes, alimony, child support or traffic tickets, etc.). The math results are 29.3% voted for HRC, 28.5% voted for non of the above by staying home even though they were registered to vote, 28% voted for President Trump, just over 11% aren’t registered even though eligible to vote, and almost 3.2% voted for other candidates or write-ins. So clearly no one can legitimately claim the support of the American people: there is no majority in America. The Republicans won majorities in the Congress in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014; but only 21% of the eligible voters voted for Republican candidates in those elections where voter turnout was down around 39%. The reason why almost as many eligible American voters stay home and don’t vote for either party every Presidential election year is because they are tired of not having anyone to vote for and are tired of having to choose between the lesser of two evils. About half of all Americans think the Democrat party has moved too far to the left and the Republican party has moved too far to the right; and neither thinks compromise and reconciliation are good ideas. Unless one party or the other divorces itself from it’s activist wings and fringe elements, left or right, and decisively makes a play for the center and moderates, then a centrist third party is the only answer to save this country.
For those who like technical details: Ancestry Composition: 23andMe’s State-of-the-Art Geographic Ancestry Analysis.
President Trump won the electoral college vote by winning the popular vote in three states (Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania) by a combined total of about 75,000 votes out of over ten million votes cast in those three states. He won Wisconsin by 0.75% of the votes cast, Michigan by 0.3%, and PA by 0.70%; and he also won North Carolina by only about 1.5% and Florida by just over 1.3% of the votes cast in those states. The first three states have a combined electoral college vote total of 46 votes and the other two have 44 combined electoral college votes. His percentage of victory in the first three was less than 1% in each and was less than 2% in each of the other two. This is important because two different surveys have shown that about 2.5 million voters were Bernie Sanders supporters who voted for President Trump only to punish the DNC and defeat HRC for what they saw as robbing Bernie of the Democrat party nomination, even though they never supported Mr. Trump and didn’t favor him becoming President and had always in the past voted for whoever the Democrat nominee was. They were just under 2% of the total votes cast nationwide, but likely more than that in normally Democrat states like Michigan and PA and Wisconsin. They were “Bernie or bust” voters who were probably heavily influenced by the Russian meddling in last year’s campaign, especially the release of the information hacked from the DNC and the HRC campaign, as well as the fake news, propaganda and social media campaigns run by the Russian meddling operations. All three cable news networks, including FNC, reported late on election day this 2% of voters reporting in exit polls (everyone uses the same exit polling data from a nationwide survey sample) that they voted for Mr. Trump even though they supported Senator Sanders and had always voted for the Democrats in the past. A separate different survey conducted a week after the election revealed that 4% of President Trump’s 63 million votes (or about 2.5 million votes) were Bernie or Bust voters. But yes, it’s true that you can lose the nationwide popular vote by millions of votes and still win the election by winning the popular vote in just eleven states: NJ, NC, MI, GA, OH, PA, IL, FL, NY, TX, and CA (the eleven states with more electoral college votes than Virginia, which has 13). That’s why several states have voted to require by state law that their electors chosen in Presidential year elections must vote in the electoral college vote for whichever candidate wins the nationwide popular vote, even if it isn’t the candidate who won the popular vote in their state. The US Constitution leaves it up to the individual states to decide and govern how their electors are chosen and how they are required to vote in the electoral college vote. This so-called “Popular Vote Law” or movement will go into effect for the states that adopt it only when enough states adopt the law to equal a majority of the electoral college vote (currently 270 votes); and they’re currently more than half way there, including California and NY. States and counties are a measurement of square miles and acres, not voters. No other democratic republic elects their top elected official by whoever won the most acres or square miles. There are seven states in the US that each individually have a smaller population than the third largest city in Texas. And those are big states in terms of square miles; but each of those states have fewer than one million eligible voters. The framers of the US Constitution and founding fathers never even imagined that just 22% of the states would have more than half of the US population, and that one-third of the states would collectively have only 15% of the total US population. Majority rule is supposed to refer to people, not acres.
From Single exodus from Africa gave rise to today’s non-Africans:
“One wave of ancient human migrants out of Africa gave rise to all non-Africans alive today, three separate genetic studies conclude.
Those human explorers left Africa about 50,000 to 72,000 years ago, mixed with Neandertals and spread across the world, researchers report online September 21 in Nature. The studies present data from genetically diverse and previously unrepresented populations. Together they offer a detailed picture of deep human history and may settle some long-standing debates, but there is still room to quibble. All non-Africans stem from one major founding population, the studies agree, but earlier human migrations are also recorded in present-day people’s DNA, one study finds. And a fourth study in the same issue of Nature, this one focusing on ancient climate, also makes the case for an earlier exodus.”
What is happening with the advisory councils is more symbolic than economic. The resignations are an effort to avoid any appearance of supporting policies which your customers might find extremely offensive.
The councils themselves have proven to be doing nothing at all for the economic interests of the industries and businesses they are supposed to be representing. Jobs are not being saved or created by the deliberations of these councils. They have instead become like President Trump’s infamous “loyalty meeting” with a table full of his inner circle of advisers at the time (most of whom are now gone from the Administration).
If you are seen associating with these councils, customers are starting to view you as pledging loyalty to a “deplorable” point of view. You aren’t going to stick around long when you are losing customers because of appearances of support for offensive policies.
The symbolism is much stronger than the actual actions of these councils.
The tech industry has some real issues which need serious attention. But these councils are not acting in ways which will address issues of immigration exemptions, travel restrictions and sharing of knowledge in a global marketplace, among other serious industry issues.
It doesn’t require a pro-liberal political point of view to cut your losses when your time and effort is being wasted. This on top of the public embarrassment of being seen with someone who refuses to denounce racism, violence and murder of political opponents. Sorry, but Antifa and BLM have not outright killed anyone for opposing them, yet.
-- rc primak
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