I've noticed two things about my extremely scientific completely anecdotal reading of a valid survey sample of opinion the tweets of DC journalists and other related insiders about Trump's cancellation of them.
1) This seems to be a bigger deal to them than other similar things.
2) The concern is about more elite civil servants because they might get mad and leave the government and we not have their expertise.
In other words, "this is a big deal for the top levels of the civil service, especially our neighbors and sources."
But of course most federal employees aren't the top civil service. They're just grunts who work in various federal government offices, and who get paid less than the elite ones.
This might be unfair, as I suggest in my first sentence, but federal civilian employees are mostly not the people at the top of the pay scales.
One thing which has started to bother me lately is the acceptance of lawyers as part of legal-PR-private detective-brand management-client protection-lobbying-borderline extortion regime. The legal profession has an important role in that, you know, even accused child molesters deserve to have proper representation, but this is not the same role as "you are going to use your legal degree and respected position in society to send a 360 degree shitstorm against anyone who threatens your rich clients." You're a shit person crossing ethical if not legal lines to get rich, and no one should respect you because of what others in your profession do. You're getting rich by using the power of other rich people to be assholes which makes you, if anything, a bigger asshole. An asshole force multiplier.
As The Daily Beast reports, “According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, NBC News general counsel Susan Weiner made a series of phone calls to Farrow, threatening to smear him if he continued to report on Weinstein.” A spokesperson for NBC News, speaking off the record, denied the allegations. “There’s no truth to that all,” The spokesperson told NBC News. “There is no chance, in no version of the world, that Susan Weiner would tell Ronan Farrow what he could or could not report on.”
Last night Trump said something like "they want to steal from Medicare for Socialism" and savvy people went "hur hur stupid Trump." But that's basically been the Paul Ryan line for many years. Arguably it's been the basic line for decades, but it's become more explicit now. The Democrats are going to take money from old people and give it to young people, who are undeserving and also blah and certainly didn't work hard and pay for it like "you" did.
The problem with Elon's mass transit ideas is that they are so stupid that it is frustrating to have to even confront them, but they have to be confronted because people who operate the public purse take them seriously.
Trump has told confidants that some of his aides have highly competent lawyers such as Lowell, who represents Kushner, and William A. Burck, who represents McGahn as well as former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon.
“He wonders why he doesn’t have lawyers like that,” said one person who has discussed the matter with Trump.
Another adviser said Trump remarked this year, “I need a lawyer like Abbe.”
Also you think "being a teevee lawyer" is the same as being "a competent lawyer."
This piece is about how a Russian Sovereign Wealth fund is investing lots of money in Elon's dream, but for my own personal interests this paragraph jumped out at me.
The Hyperloop transportation system, as Musk designed it, is supposed to make daily commuting easier—an alternative to a high-speed rail that had been proposed in California. The plan? A scene out of The Jetsons: Put people in pods and use compressed air to shoot them through a tube at supersonic speed so they can make their morning meetings. Musk envisioned people commuting from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes. “Is there truly a new mode of transport—a fifth mode after planes, trains, cars and boats?” Musk asked in a 57-page white paper describing the notion.
Look even if this thing works as envisioned, and is built, and manages to cover its costs, it will still not be good for daily commuting. The "last mile" problem is often overstated because a mile isn't very far, but a "hyperloop station," wherever it is, is more like an airport, in that there's going to be precisely one of them. It isn't a network, it's a line. Also it's going to be like an airport in that it will inevitably have airport like, or close to it, security. Sure if the stop is in the basement of my building I could use it to commute from LA to San Francisco, if the other stop was, you know, in the basement of my office, but otherwise...
I mean by this logic I can "commute" from Philadelphia to Boston because those flights are about 50 minutes (if all goes well), but I gotta get to and from the airports, so, uh, no.
As he would later learn, Juan is one of a growing number of people whose official birth records show they were born in the United States but who are now being denied passports — their citizenship suddenly thrown into question. The Trump administration is accusing hundreds, and possibly thousands, of Hispanics along the border of using fraudulent birth certificates since they were babies, and it is undertaking a widespread crackdown on their citizenship.
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Based on those suspicions, the State Department began during Barack Obama’s administration to deny passports to people who were delivered by midwives in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley. The use of midwives is a long-standing tradition in the region, in part because of the cost of hospital care.
Tesla violated U.S. labor laws when CEO Elon Musk tweeted in May that his employees would lose their stock options if they organized a union, according to the National Labor Relations Board.
Racism is about all they have left. Even the homophobia has been played out, and the attempts at the Great Trans Bathroom Scares didn't work very well.
But we did elect Obama twice. I have no illusions that racism isn't broad and deep in this country, but I also think... it gets boring after awhile? Not for the hardcore, of course, but for enough people. Like eventually the bubble bursts and people wonder why they spent 5 seconds worrying about NFL payers kneeling. Not that they're going to support it, just realize they probably have other things to worry about it.
A British man, who Elon Musk called a “pedo” on Twitter, has retained legal counsel and is “preparing a civil complaint for libel” against the Tesla CEO, according to a letter viewed by BuzzFeed News. The letter appears to contradict a claim Musk made on Twitter on Tuesday that he had yet to see any legal repercussions from his allegations, and deepens the problems for the already embattled technology billionaire.
Waymo also said it was still on course to launch its first commercial self-driving taxi service by the end of 2018, but every car will have a human “chaperone” inside to keep an eye on it.
Road rage is a thing, and there's nothing drivers hate more than people who drive safely.
Two weeks ago, Lisa Hargis, an administrative assistant who works at an office a stone’s throw from Waymo’s vehicle depot, said she nearly hit a Waymo Chrysler Pacifica minivan because it stopped abruptly while making a right turn at the intersection. “Go!” she shouted angrily, she said, after getting stuck in the intersection midway through her left turn. Cars that had been driving behind the Waymo van also stopped. “I was going to murder someone,” she said.
I don't care if people think John McCain was good or bad. The absurd thing was all the "Democrats" who wished he was one. Theater, not policy. Did you see his voting record? You people devoted your life to covering politics and you didn't care at all for the outcome. You just liked the show.
I don't care if people like or don't like John McCain. Whatever. But the worship of John McCain which is almost entirely without mention of policies he supported or would have supported demonstrates what is wrong with our political press corps. It's a costume drama to them.
When you or your wife or your cousin or your sister or your daughter needs necessary medical care, you can thank John McCain for making that impossible.
Late in life I became a big fan of fruit. I don't mean that I didn't like it before, just that I took an interest. And while one can get many things out of season (of varying quality) there are some things that you just can't get out of season. One of them is muscadines.
I live around the corner from a large Vietnamese grocery store. They always carry muscadines when they are in season. A few days ago I went in to buy a bunch of them, and there was a man loading the whole stock into a box. He bought them all! I figured... ok, whatever, I'll come back tomorrow and there will be more muscadines.
I've spent a lot of time (god my life is horrible give me some money please) thinking about the politics of the DC political press corps. Obviously they aren't all precisely the same, but there is a culture. Roughly they're moderate Republicans in a world that doesn't actually have any moderate Republicans aside from them. They're Nice Polite Republicans.
They like low taxes. They think there are real problems in the world that should be solved, but they think Bill Gates, not the government, should solve them. Charity is noble, welfare is bad. They don't like racism, but racism to them is the uncouth N*clang kind, not the "let's hear what Charles Murray has to say" kind. More troubling than racism is "identity politics" which is the politics of people who don't run the world. Homophobia is bad but, really, people should just keep these things to themselves and gay marriage was crazy radical until it wasn't.
If you squint a bit, the difference between Nice Polite Republicans and Republicans is the Polite part, and manners are mostly a class-based construct to help identify the insiders and the outsiders. In other words, they're just upper middle class white people who probably vote for Democrats much of the time but are desperate to vote for Republicans as soon as they can find one who knows which fork to use with the appetizer and who treats the help nicely, at least in public. Every time Fournier or Friedman or Matthew Dowd or whoever starts on the third party wank this is what they are talking about. They want politicians who pretend to give a shit, who intellectualize their racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and know who the people who really matter are.
This is...the weirdest "defense" I have ever seen, but, hey, it's Trump and his brain is filled with worms.
Capone spent some time in Philly the first time he went to prison. His cell was a bit nicer than typical, for reasons you can guess. The prison (Eastern State Penitentiary) is now a museum and one of those things you should see if you ever visit the hellhole.
Trump with the usual fiction: "They're saying Christmas again now, right. Remember at the beginning of my campaign, it was December and I'd go see these stores and they'd never say Merry Christmas. They're all saying Merry Christmas now."
You, dear readers, know that I have not forgotten about how bad the Bush administration was and am quite mad that many others have. Still... there were a lot of bad people in the Bush administration... and a few that certainly could have held their own in the Biggest Shit Person competition in the Trump White House, and yet... they weren't all quite so... lacking in any redeeming qualities whatsoever. At least some of them were...smart? Or at least, not so stupid. Evil, but not entirely dumb. I never wondered if Dick Cheney and Ari Fleischer knew how to tie their shoes. Even the young stupid ones were the Gen-X versions of Young Republicans, not the Millennial versions. Somehow being raised on Rush Limbaugh is better than being raised on Ben Shapiro and Erick Erickson. Not a lot better...but...
NEWS: TrumpWorld v worried the Weisselberg immunity deal is shifting the crosshairs onto the Trump children, I'm learning. Sources insist family member would have had to authorize payments to Michael Cohen. (Remember MC's first monthly invoice was not sent till Feb 2017.)
(CNN)Rep. Duncan D. Hunter seemed to shift any blame onto his wife, Margaret, on Thursday for alleged campaign fund abuses, saying she was the one handling his finances.
"She was also the campaign manager, so whatever she did that'll be looked at too, I'm sure," the California Republican said on Fox News.
"But I didn't do it," Hunter said. "I didn't spend any money illegally."
The Manhattan district attorney’s office is considering pursuing criminal charges against the Trump Organization and two senior company officials in connection with Michael D. Cohen’s hush money payment to an adult film actress, according to two officials with knowledge of the matter.
A state investigation would center on how the company accounted for its reimbursement to Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 he paid to the actress, Stephanie Clifford, who has said she had an affair with President Trump, the officials said.
Still, as reporters keep reminding us, people who love Trump love Trump, as if there is some sort of Zen meaning in this tautology.
NEW YORK (AP) — The National Enquirer kept a safe containing documents on hush money payments and other damaging stories it killed as part of its cozy relationship with Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 presidential election, people familiar with the arrangement told The Associated Press.
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The AP cannot say whether the documents were destroyed or simply were moved to a location known to fewer people.
Stories about people "cooperating" with law enforcement are a bit ambiguous, especially when written by the gossip reporters of the newspaper, because "cooperating" can mean various things. That they were given immunity means... a bit more.
And now Trump’s most powerful media ally next to Fox News has broken with him. According to two sources briefed on the Cohen investigation, prosecutors granted immunity to David Pecker, chairman of The National Enquirer publisher American Media Inc., and A.M.I.’s chief content officer, Dylan Howard, so they would describe Trump’s involvement in Cohen’s payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal during the 2016 campaign. The Wall Street Journal first reported Pecker’s cooperation on Wednesday night. (Pecker and Howard did not respond to multiple requests for comment. A spokesperson for the Southern District of New York declined to comment.)
Though really it's his buddies in the press. Our "fact checkers" are dumdums who just recycle whatever their pals on their rolodexes say, and when it comes to policy, those pals are right wing think tank propagandists.
Practically nothing gets this kind of support, but better be careful say many well-paid Democratic strategists worried about their next big lobbying job.
(Scroll down. 70% polled support Medicare for all. not 70% of Democrats. 70%).
“One person complained and said, are we going to have to listen to the sounds of kids laughing and yelling?” developer Jason Nusbaum told Billy Penn. “We could have worse problems.”
While zoning board members ultimately voted to welcome the childcare facility into the tony neighborhood, their unanimous decision did not come without a massive argument about noise, traffic and, of course, parking.
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“There is total gridlock in the neighborhood,” said Kristin Hayes, who said she’s raised two daughters from her home at 22nd and Pine. “Traffic is backed up through Graduate Hospital. It’s going to be a complete fiasco.”
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Still, residents’ complaints about the influx of parents and children seemed inexhaustible. Car traffic at drop-off times, people with strollers crossing Pine Street, and “the noise of those children” — all this would disrupt the neighborhood’s desired rhythm, residents argued.
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Another resident, Frederick Masters, pursued recourse options for the daycare’s worst offenders. Could the ZBA, he asked, force the developer to expel students if their parents park illegally while dropping them off for daycare?
There's a daycare around the corner from me. I enjoy when the toddler train goes by my house and interrupts my peace and quiet for 20 seconds.
It's filled with white supremacists and sadists who understandably don't think there are any limits on or accountability for their behavior. Burning (metaphorically) the whole thing to the ground is the only way.
That's when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at the children's shelter, slapped handcuffs on Orellana's wrists, chained them to his waist, and shackled his legs together. The agents drove Orellana to the Broward Transitional Center, an infamous immigration jail in Pompano Beach, where he was thrown into a cell with men twice his age.
Orellana's saga isn't just shocking — it's also illegal, say Miami immigration attorneys who have succeeded in forcing ICE to release several other 18 year olds in recent months. Even worse, they say what happened to the Guatemalan refugee seems to have become ICE's national policy.
"When they turn 18, it's basically, 'Happy birthday,' and then they slap on handcuffs and take them off to adult detention centers," says Lisa Lehner, an attorney with the nonprofit Americans for Immigrant Justice who is representing Orellana.
I don't want to hear any Democrats talk about modestly changing the mission parameters blahblahblah. What's going on are crimes against humanity - not to mention blatant violations of US law which our system is unwilling and unable to deal with. Just close all of the doors and send everybody home to spend the rest of their lives wondering when their day of justice will come (it never will, of course).
Adding to the pressure, David Pecker, the chairman of American Media Inc., which publishes the National Enquirer, provided prosecutors with details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged with women who alleged sexual encounters with President Trump, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals.
Scott Lloyd’s anti-abortion crusade began when, as a young man, he found himself faced with a partner’s unexpected pregnancy. Many years later, Lloyd would take his battle to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement, where, as its leader since March 2017, he has personally intervened to block teenage migrants in federal custody, including at least one rape victim, from accessing abortions. But it was that summer day long ago that made him decide abortion is wrong under all circumstances, including rape, incest, and when the life of the mother is at risk. When asked about his plans for the day, he said he was going fishing; instead, he drove the young woman he had gotten pregnant to get the abortion he disagreed with. Years later, as a first-year law student at Catholic University, he described this formative experience in anguished detail in a class assignment provided to Mother Jones by a classmate and confirmed by seven others.
“The truth about abortion,” he wrote, “is that my first child is dead, and no woman, man, Supreme Court, or government—NOBODY—has the right to tell me that she doesn’t belong here.”
Well, my dude, you were the one who "killed" this child. Sorry no "woman, man, Supreme Court, or government" prevented you from doing it. But cool blaming everyone else for your sins, you evil fuck.
I thought the American Dream people would have made this a non-problem by now, but... maybe not!
Cassella says that the town will not be willing to relax Bergen County Blue Laws, which ban retail sales on Sundays in the county.
“They’ll be able to go to the water and amusement parks. They’ll be able to go to the movie theater. There’ll be restaurants. There’s ice skating in there. There’s skiing in there. All of that I believe they’ll be able to do,” the mayor says.
Everybody except our 5-year-old president on a long car trip knows that they just keep telling him this so he doesn't nuke a random country.
Giuliani, calling Post from golf course in Scotland, says he has spoken with POTUS today and deliberated over what it all means—Manafort, Cohen, etc. Says, optimistically, they believe Mueller “might be at the end now. He has to be winding down. What else is there? Near the end.”
There's a certain kind of pundit (many if not necessarily most) who treat everything as theater, as a game with an outcome that affects no one, or at least not them, which is the same thing (though they do squeal when the few things which do affect them are front and center). Maybe this is in part an outcome of supposed norms of journalism, in which even somewhat supposedly ideological (they're all ideological, it's about how much they admit it) pundits are supposed to observe, not participate, to be disconnected referees of the great game. Still I just wonder constantly... how little empathy do these people have? How can it be that their own lives have been so untouched by strife?
I don't really distinguish "pundits" from "political reporters" much. At least once they start going on teevee regularly the difference is mostly which name tag they wear.
The Hunters used campaign funds for ski trips, hotel stays and European vacations, according to the indictment. They dined everywhere from Spago to Taco Bell, from Mister A’s to Weinerschnitzel.
They golfed. They bought make-up. They paid for airline tickets for friends and relatives and invested in tequila shots and gourmet steaks.
(CNN)Rep. Duncan Hunter and his wife, Margaret, were indicted Tuesday on charges related to the misuse of $250,000 worth of campaign funds for personal expenses and the filing of false campaign finance records.
The charges of wire fraud, falsifying records, campaign finance violations and conspiracy were the culmination of a Department of Justice investigation that has stretched for more than a year, during which the Republican congressman from California has maintained his innocence.
Rich people can escape the negative effects of many things, but it's hard to escape air water, and ground pollution (and the related contamination of the food supply). Sure their kids aren't growing up on top of a Superfund site, but they gotta breathe. They haven't built their domed enclaves yet.
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Tuesday made public the details of its new pollution rules governing coal-burning power plants, and the fine print includes an acknowledgment that the plan would increase carbon emissions and lead to up to 1,400 premature deaths annually.
I'm pretty sure this won't be prosecuted (prove me wrong!). Laws are not meant for law enforcement.
The Alameda County Sheriff’s Office illegally recorded at least one confidential conversation between a juvenile crime suspect and his attorney, the county public defender’s office said Monday, and an exchange between two sheriff’s officials captured on video suggests that the practice may have been routine.
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Secretly recording a conversation between a person in custody and the person’s attorney is a felony under California law. The district attorney’s office will investigate whether to file charges in the case, an agency spokeswoman said.
My understanding of America 2018 (er..2019 when it opens) might not be fully correct. Maybe the American Dream will be immensely popular. I have been wrong once or twice before! But this part I... doubt.
You can't get most NYC tourists to go 10 blocks away from Times Square. You aren't going to get them on a bus to New Jersey.
American Dream is expected to open in the spring of 2019, at which time it’s estimated that it will draw 30-40 million visitors a year, many of whom are projected to be tourists visiting NYC. There will be a commuter shuttle from the NJ Transit stops at the Meadowlands and Secaucus, as well as a direct bus route from Port Authority.
I follow John on the Twitter box and enjoy his urban walking adventures. Sadly, I don't think most cities are as good for it as London is, because London is a great place to just wander.
The received wisdom, though, is that the best walking is done in the countryside, where the air is clean and the views are dramatic. Walking in cities – especially the suburban or industrial quarters where I often end up, even if I don’t intend to – is less fashionable. Well: the received wisdom is wrong. Urban walking is better, and I’m willing to go head to head with anyone who says otherwise.
One reason is that, with the best will in the world, the countryside is boring. One field is very like another, and many of them are filled with cows which, though nobody likes to talk about it, have a nasty habit of killing people they take against. In a city, there’s more to see, and you’re less likely to get stamped on by a cow.
Walking is the best way of getting to know a place, too. There’s only so much you can learn from behind the wheel of a car or the window of a train, zooming past things before you even notice them, and anyway, in those vehicles, you need a destination. On foot, though, you can wander: serendipity kicks in, and you find things you never even knew you were looking for. On one long walk, I discovered the world’s first municipal park in Birkenhead, the model for Central Park in New York. On another, I learned of the existence of St Volodymyr, whose Christianisation of Kievan Rus is commemorated by a statue in Holland Park. This is not the sort of thing that you learn in a field.
Lately, my local H Mart is in Cheltenham, a town northeast of Philadelphia. My routine is to drive in for lunch on the weekends, stock up on groceries for the week, and cook something for dinner with whatever fresh bounty inspired me. The H Mart in Cheltenham has two stories; the grocery is on the first floor and the food court is above it. Upstairs, there is an array of stalls for different kinds of food. One is dedicated to sushi, one is strictly Chinese, and another is for traditional Korean jjigaes, bubbling soups served in traditional stone pots called dolsots, which act as mini cauldrons to insure that your soup is still bubbling a good ten minutes past arrival. There’s a stall for Korean street food, which serves up Korean ramen (which basically just means Shin Cup Noodles with an egg cracked in them); giant steamed dumplings full of pork and glass noodles, housed in a thick, cake-like dough; and tteokbokki, chewy, bite-sized cylindrical rice cakes boiled in a stock with fishcakes, red pepper, and gochujang, a sweet-and-spicy paste that’s one of the three mother sauces used in pretty much all Korean dishes. Last, there’s my personal favorite: Korean-Chinese fusion, which serves tangsuyuk—a glossy, sweet-and-sour orange pork—seafood noodle soup, fried rice, and jajangmyeon.
The food court is the perfect place to people-watch while sucking down salty, fatty, black-bean noodles. I think about my family who lived in Korea, before most of them died, and how Korean-Chinese food was always the first thing we’d eat when my mom and I arrived in Seoul after a fourteen-hour flight from America. Twenty minutes after my aunt would phone in our order, the apartment ringer would buzz “Für Elise” in midi, and up would come a helmeted man, fresh off his motorcycle, with a giant steel box. He’d slide open the metal door and deliver heaping bowls of noodles and deep-fried battered pork with its rich sauce on the side. The Saran wrap on top would be concave and sweating. We’d peel it off and dribble black, chunky goodness all over the noodles and pour the shiny, sticky, translucent orange sauce over the pork. We’d sit cross-legged on the cool marble floor, slurping and reaching over one another. My aunts and mom and grandmother would jabber on in Korean, and I would eat and listen, unable to comprehend, bothering my mom every so often to translate.
I'll even stan for "real" British food - not the legacy of postwar rationing and 20th century convenience cooking which was sort of like our own (those 70s cookbooks are awesome) but more impoverished, but the actual good stuff - but the idea that "good" food generally in London is something which only happened a few years ago is hilarious, especially that good Indian cuisine is a new arrival. "Curry" has been the national dish for decades, and not just some bland packaged-for-boiled mutton palates version, but good stuff! New Yorkers really need to get out more.
The question of whether the "food" (from the point of view of tourists, this basically means restaurants) is "good" somewhere is always some combination of the "average random restaurant" the "know where to go but still affordable restaurant" and "elite cooking." Any big city always has at least some of the third and any big city with a nontrivial immigrant population (which London has had more than much of Europe for a long time) has a lot of the second. As for the first, that's pretty shit anywhere in tourist areas in places with big tourist populations, though that jamon bocadito might be preferable to the sausage roll depending on your tastes.
Obviously part of the fantasy of self-driving car manufacturer wannabees is that municipalities will participate (cough pay for cough) in the construction of numerous technological and infrastructure aids to make the whole thing more possible. I think even if we grant the willingness to of governments to do this, the scale is...tremendous... and to the extent that this involves technology (sensors/communication etc.) and not just "keeping the lanes painted" type activities, obsolete the instant they're built.
But more than that, it's easy to get governments and transit agencies on board with shiny new projects. It's much much much much harder to get them on board with significant ongoing maintenance.
Similarly, there's this idea that we can take lanes for the use by automated vehicles only. This one is extra weird. It's practically impossible to take a lane from cars to make a bus lane (and even more impossible to do so with any enforcement unless the lanes are physically separated somehow). And if automated cars "need" these lanes then they aren't very automated. If they don't "need" them...um, why should they have them?
One constant mystery to me in the self-driving car discussion is... why do regular drivers not understand how difficult driving is? I guess the answer is obvious. It's such a "normal" task that it doesn't seem to be that hard. It becomes rote so people don't think about it very much. I've had a license since I was 16, used to drive all the time, and now don't drive very often. Driving is... hard!
I know some subjects bore people, but finding things to obsess about is really the only way to keep the fresh not so exciting content coming at you regularly.
Federal authorities investigating whether President Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer, Michael D. Cohen, committed bank and tax fraud have zeroed in on well over $20 million in loans obtained by taxi businesses that he and his family own, according to people familiar with the matter.
All the Russia stuff aside, the other major story is that white collar crime is never prosecuted, and if it was half the rich people in the country would go to jail.
At one level it's a good Romcom, nothing more (but a good one if you like that sort of thing), but at another it's very cleverly aware of how it goes about doing that with essentially an all-Asian cast (really there are no white people with speaking lines - and barely any extras - after the first 5 minutes) in how it deals with that representation in a film in our current context and how it and mocks/invokes/exploits some of the tropes surrounding that. Worth seeing.
(CNN)A speechwriter for President Donald Trump who attended a conference frequented by white nationalists has left the White House.
CNN's KFile reached out to the White House last week about Darren Beattie, a policy aide and speechwriter, who was listed as speaking at the 2016 H.L. Mencken Club Conference.
Of course it isn't just how much you spend, it's what you get for your money. And even "the other plan that isn't Bernie's plan" is a helluva deal relative to the status quo, according to The Glibertarians.
With that all said, which score you go with really does not matter that much. None of these bars are that precise and even the Mercatus M4A plan is an incredible deal.
Relative to the status quo, the Sanders M4A plan insures 30 million more people, virtually eliminates out-of-pocket expenses, and provides hearing, visual, and dental coverage for everyone. The cost is the same as we already spend in the status quo minus 0.7 points of GDP.
Relative to the status quo, the Mercatus M4A plan does the same thing the Sanders M4A plan does except the cost is the same as we already spend in the status quo plus 1.1 points of GDP.
So one very generous way of describing the Mercatus’s report is to say that: Mercatus has concluded we can insure 30 million more people, virtually eliminate out-of-pocket expenses, and provide hearing, visual, and dental coverage for everyone — all for the same price we are currently paying for healthcare plus or minus 1 point of GDP. That is a no-brainer deal if I’ve ever heard one.
In some ways Jake Tapper is better than your average press bear, but also in some ways... not so much. The glibertarians did a study which showed Bernie's plan saved TWO TRILLION DOLLARS which wasn't what they wanted to highlight. They wanted to highlight the fact that government would spend TRILLIONS ON HEALTH CARE. Then the glibertarians decided that if you focused on some other plan then that other plan didn't save two trillion dollars so that meant that Bernie's plan didn't really save two trillion dollars. Of course that is good enough for the press, who get all their economics and policy stuff from right wing think tanks, which decided that lefties were wrong and dumb again.
Than Tapper took it a step further and said Bernie was a big liar because he claimed the study said his plan would save THE GOVERNMENT two trillion dollars which isn't true and also, too, Bernie and his people never said that.
Mr. McGahn’s cooperation began in part as a result of a decision by Mr. Trump’s first team of criminal lawyers to collaborate fully with Mr. Mueller. The president’s lawyers have explained that they believed their client had nothing to hide and that they could bring the investigation to an end quickly.
Mr. McGahn and his lawyer, William A. Burck, could not understand why Mr. Trump was so willing to allow Mr. McGahn to speak freely to the special counsel and feared Mr. Trump was setting up Mr. McGahn to take the blame for any possible illegal acts of obstruction, according to people close to him. So he and Mr. Burck devised their own strategy to do as much as possible to cooperate with Mr. Mueller to demonstrate that Mr. McGahn did nothing wrong.
American Dream was originally slated to open in 2017. Then last summer Triple Five pushed back the completion date because it had difficulty securing the $1.1 billion in financing. It worked with Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan to secure $1.6 billion in financing earlier this year.
Even ignoring its previous incarnation as "Xanadu," the "American Dream" was "originally slated to open" in... 2013.
American Dream Meadowlands’ amusement park, originally slated to open in the fall of 2013, won’t be finished by the Feb. 2, 2014, date for Super Bowl XLVIII, developer Triple Five conceded in March. And it now says the shopping mall also may not be ready by then.
Her husband Joel Arrona was driving his wife to the hospital for a scheduled Cesarean section Wednesday afternoon when they had to stop to get gas. That’s when their car was approached by two SUVs. Maria said they were officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The mother of five was then asked to show her identification and complied. When the agents asked Arrona, the couple said he didn’t have the ID on him, but that they lived nearby and could go get it for them. The agents then asked Arrona to exit the vehicle, searched the car for weapons, and put Arrona into custody, leaving Maria alone at the gas station.
Los Angeles Metro will be the first U.S. transit agency to use a security system created by the federal Transportation Security Administration to scan riders as they enter the system, the agency announced this week. New York and San Francisco has also been testing the technology, which TSA says will thwart terrorism or mass shootings. The agency says it plans to install the system at transit stations around the country, the New York Times reports.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is increasingly venting frustration to his national security team about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan and showing renewed interest in a proposal by Blackwater founder Erik Prince to privatize the war, current and former senior administration officials said.
Once we completely redo our driving infrastructure and ban pedestrians.
You’re crossing the street wrong.
That is essentially the argument some self-driving car boosters have fallen back on in the months after the first pedestrian death attributed to an autonomous vehicle and amid growing concerns that artificial intelligence capable of real-world driving is further away than many predicted just a few years ago.
...
But to others the very fact that Ng is suggesting such a thing is a sign that today’s technology simply can’t deliver self-driving cars as originally envisioned. “The AI we would really need hasn't yet arrived,” says Gary Marcus, a New York University professor of psychology who researches both human and artificial intelligence. He says Ng is “just redefining the goalposts to make the job easier,” and that if the only way we can achieve safe self-driving cars is to completely segregate them from human drivers and pedestrians, we already had such technology: trains.
It isn't really about trains - as in things on rails - if you're willing to have completely segregated rights of way it can be buses or self-driving scooters or whatever. But cities are made of people. People gotta go somewhere, and then they get out of their vehicles and...
The self-driving cars were Uber's hail mary pass. If they get rid of that... then? Their path to profitability always required establishing monopoly - and then jacking up rates - somehow, but their path to monopoly was never clear. I don't even think self-driving cars were the path. Just another shiny object to flash to investors. Now the (some) investors are done.
Some investors have told Uber officials that it may be wise to divest the self-driving car unit, said a person familiar with the issue. Uber has invested least $2 billion in the unit over the past three years. Yet the company hasn’t yet come up with a clear path to commercializing the technology it has developed.
Will be interesting if the two major taxi app companies (Uber, Lyft) fold.
The dirty little secret of LA is that transit there is actually pretty good. They have trains and subways and buses. A lot of buses! The buses are good. But LA is big and sprawly and in too many places (not all places!) even when the transit is good the walking is not. Mass transit rarely brings you door to door, but the "last mile problem" or certainly the "last half mile problem" isn't actually a problem if that last half mile or so is a pleasant and relatively efficient stroll.
It's standard (and correct) to say that mass transit decisions are too often made by people who would never ride any of it. It's also largely true that it's made by people who never walk anywhere, and walking is always a critical complement to a decent transit system. Improve your sidewalks. Add more crosswalks. Lengthen pedestrian signal times. Stop giving ridiculous tickets for "jaywalking." Do give tickets for crosswalk blocking and bus lane parking cars. It isn't hard.
My rule of pseudo-scandals that get saturation coverage is that they have to be a little bit stupid. "This is bad" is boring. "This is sorta bad but mostly it's dumb and I can't believe we can't stop talking about it but the fact that we are talking about it is so stupid and I can't stop talking about that" is really what drives an endless pseudoscandal coverage. Also, too, sex, particularly sex involving Democrats.
Musk's cunning plans are like that to me. They're so obviously stupid and yet they get lots of media coverage and I can't stop talking about them because they're obviously so stupid but everybody is talking about them and it's so stupid that everybody is talking about them so I can't stop talking about that.
Musk isn't going to build this tunnel to Dodger stadium. He certainly isn't going to build it in earthquake country without a long and massive review process. If he does manage to build it then it will be mostly useless and will close up unless someone pumps massive amounts of subsidies into it as the optimistic projected revenue barely covers 5 full time staffers. No one wants to stand in line for an hour or more because this dumbass rich guy is obsessed with the idea that the problem with trains is that they have too many gross people on them, or something.
But I can't stop talking about it because it's so dumb.
Just need to keep getting gullible local officials to throw money at you for a "study." No good way to get to Dodger stadium so...how about low capacity cars on sleds! They're good for everything!
The Boring Company is proposing to build Dugout Loop, a zero-emissions, high-speed, underground public transportation system from the Los Feliz, East Hollywood, or Rampart Village neighborhoods ("western terminus") to Dodger Stadium in the City of Los Angeles.
Loop is a zero-emissions, high-speed underground public transportation system in which passengers are transported on autonomous electric skates traveling at 125-150 miles per hour. Electric skates will carry between 8 and 16 passengers.
I highly doubt they'll travel this fast, but the real point is that it doesn't matter. Boarding is the real bottleneck for things like this. Picture the taxi line at the airport, or the line for the rollercoaster. That's what you get when you can only board a dozen people at a time. The line's gonna be long, Brant.
Oh, sorry, line? No there will be an app for that which will totally solve this problem (hahahaahahaha).
Initially, riders will be able to reserve times and purchase Dugout Loop tickets in advance similar to booking seats at a movie theater via a mobile app, over the phone, or in person (e.g. 5:45pm PT Dugout Loop ticket).
Remember this is primarily a baseball game transportation device. What time would you like to go to the baseball game? And sure, arrivals can be staggered a bit, but everybody wants to leave at the same time...enjoy the line!
Initially, Dugout Loop will be limited to approximately 1,400 people (approximately 2.5% of Stadium capacity) per event.
I love how it doesn't even say "per hour" but "per event" which probably includes at least a 2 hour window (guessing!). One real subway train can easily carry 1000, board them all quickly, and you can run one ever 2 minutes. One attraction to these "sleds" is the weird idea that if you have lower capacity you can run them more often, but headways aren't really a technical constraint of subway systems. Any modern subway system can run 24 trains per hour easy, and plenty do 32. At that point it's the boarding time that makes running them more often be impractical. Even our pretty antiquated trolley system in Philly runs through the tunnel with <3 minute headways at peak, and they carry about 70 people per train.
Electric skates are zero-emission vehicles, and thus do not output hazardous gases like internal combustion cars do.
Wow electric powered underground vehicles. What will Elon think of next?
The fares are not finalized but will cost around $1.
Their own projections put it at 250,000 riders per year. Let's say each does roundtrip, so 500,000 total. Time for some math. All that grad school must have been good for something. Let's see if I remember how to do this.
Oh yes. 500,000×$1= $500,000. Sure most transit systems are subsidized, but, uh...
The journalist didn't accept it after the fact, but it's confirmation that "a source close to X who happens to be X" is a standard game in DC.
Me: You told me you found [George’s tweets] disrespectful.
Kellyanne: It is disrespectful, it’s a violation of basic decency, certainly, if not marital vows . . . as “a person familiar with their relationship.”
Me: No, we’re on the record here. You can’t say after the fact “as someone familiar.”
Kellyanne: I told you everything about his tweets was off the record.
Me: No, that’s not true. That never happened.
Kellyanne: Well, people do see it this way. People do see it that way, I don’t say I do, but people see it that way.
Me: But I’m saying we never discussed everything about his tweets being off the record. There are certain things you said that I put off the record.
Kellyanne: Fine. I’ve never actually said what I think about it and I won’t say what I think about it, which tells you what I think about it.
The SEC has served Tesla with a subpoena after CEO Elon Musk tweeted that he was considering taking the company private and that he had the necessary funding lined up, according to a report by the New York Times published Wednesday.
Earlier reports said the agency had intensified earlier scrutiny of the automaker after the controversial tweet. A subpoena would be one of the first steps in a formal inquiry.
Jaywalking could become a critical issue. Pedestrians and pranksters, knowing that the cars are programmed to yield to any in their path, could bring traffic to a halt. Outfitting the cars with facial recognition technology could help identify violators, but that raises its own tricky issues.
Drivers lose their shit over speed cameras but, hey, sure blanket cities with facial recognition devices to bust jaywalkers (and much of what people consider "jay walking" is, at the moment, perfectly legal generally if not everywhere).
At least I've noticed more urbanist types who thought self-driving cars would be great for urbanism are starting to lose the faith a bit.
Safety has never been my issue, and it isn't the issue here. If they work they'll be safe enough. It's almost tautological. I just don't think they'll work. This stuff isn't about making them safe, it's about trying (and still failing) to make them work with massive amounts of taxpayer money. The headline of that article is "To Make Self-Driving Cars Safe, We Also Need Better Roads and Infrastructure" but the article isn't really about safety, unless we define safety as "not having a license to play Death Race 2000" (I forgot Stallone was in that movie!). It's about making them function. It's a big country. Good luck with that.
This means that we need to think not just about the onboard technology but also about the environment in which it is deployed. We’ll likely start to see a more standardized and active environment as more smart infrastructure is constructed. Think of radio transmitters replacing traffic lights, higher-capacity mobile and wireless data networks handling both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication, and roadside units providing real-time data on weather, traffic, and other conditions. Common protocols and communications standards will have to be devised and negotiated, as they were with internet communication protocols or the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) for mobile phones. This transition will take decades, and autonomous vehicles will have to share the roads with human drivers.
If rapid, radical change to the driving environment is impractical, what is the alternative? The most likely near-term scenario we’ll see are various forms of spatial segregation: Self-driving cars will operate in some areas and not others. We’re already seeing this, as early trials of the technology are taking place in designated test areas or in relatively simple, fair-weather environments. But we may also see dedicated lanes or zones for self-driving vehicles, both to give them a more structured environment while the technology is refined and to protect other road users from their limitations.
This post is data free because I am lazy blogger, but... Obviously it's always been the case that parental wealth and stature have had a lot to do with the fortunes (in all ways) of their progeny, but during the great middle class post-war boom years such things mattered less (of course I'm basically talking about white people here, the experiences of non-white people during this time are a bit more, uh, complicated). When it wasn't all that hard to get a ticket to the middle class - decent union/public sector job requiring little credentialing was enough - the bank of mom and dad was more of a bonus, not a necessity. Sure the rich were still the rich, but for everyone else...
But that bank has gone from paying the annual Christmas bonus to financing lives, education, and home purchases. Also, people lower on the economic spectrum don't just lack parental support, they have to provide support for their ageing parents. There are big parts of the country which are increasingly closed off to people without that kind of support. I mean, sure, we can all live in flophouses with several roommates in our 20s, but in areas where you need $150,000 for a downpayment for a house... few can afford to plan a long term life.
My rambling point is that the ticket to the middle class has become a golden ticket, one you might find with your birth certificate.
Members of Tesla’s board are scrambling to control a chief executive who some directors think is out of control.
Elon Musk, the electric-car maker’s co-founder and chief executive, stirred up a public storm by announcing on Twitter last week that he wanted to turn Tesla into a private company. In recent days, according to people familiar with the matter, some of his fellow board members delivered a stern message: Stop tweeting.
Too many people keep thinking one of two things will happen Any Time Now:
1) Trump will get caught doing something so terrible that The Wise Old Men of Washington and the MSM will finally have enough and monster the guy until he's hounded out of office, or at least monster the other Republicans until they hound him out of office.
2) Trump will get caught doing something so terrible that the only other people who matter, the Trump Voters Who Support Trump, will stop supporting Trump.
Here is the grand jury report of the PA Catholic clergy sex abuse investigation, with allegations against 300+ priests, 1000+ children victims identified, most events occurring before early 2000s. The report is 1,356 pages. https://t.co/C0aBYi9VBK
This is boring meta, but early on in the blogging world I made a post which got some attention because it was definitive proof that one of our very respectable conservative pundits was a complete hack. Weorge Gill, I think his name rhymed with. But what was funny is no one - online, in the meatspace media - would attribute this blog or me by name (actual or pseudonym, whatever) or link to it. Linking to some random guy on the internet (which I basically was then) was... somehow wrong... that the simple facts of the post would be discredited if they were associated with a mere "blog" and it was best to therefore pretend it didn't exist.
Not reminiscing about the glory days. I'm just reminded of that whenever very serious journalists do things like think parody twitter accounts are real and retweet and cite them, something which happens regularly (hi Chris Cillizza) these days.
I would just be mildly amused by Musk because he's such a dumbass on twitter except for the fact that he's pushing the latest in Vaporware mass transit which follows the usual pattern off mass transit Vaporware. Basically, it won't work and even if it works it won't work because it won't be mass transit but it will suck a lot of public dollars and prevent useful mass transit from being built as dumbasses say we must not use "19th century technology (trains)" when we can just wait for the Star Trek transporter to be invented.
But three people familiar with the workings of the Saudi fund cast doubt on his account. They said the fund had taken none of the steps that such an ambitious transaction would entail, like preparing a term sheet or hiring a financial adviser to work on the deal.
And even if the fund were ready to move forward with such an agreement, it would invite review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the government body that reviews the national-security implications of such transactions.
Anyway, you can get away with an immense amount of fraud in this country but when rich people try to defraud other rich people they occasionally run into problems.
Elon Musk has written a blog post explaining why he said last week on Twitter that he might take Tesla private at $420 a share. "Funding secured," he declared in the tweet.
But after reading Musk's new post, the only conclusion to be drawn is that funding was, in fact, not secured.
This time it's Don Jr. so it's extra stupid (you can find it yourself), but it's always such a stupid formulation. A RISING STAR... um, based on what? A good PR person, basically. A beat sweetener. The ability to get the media to pay attention to you and write nice stories about the fact that you can get the media to pay attention to you and write nice stories. It's extra annoying because basically any Republican with a heartbeat gets the RISING STAR treatment at some point, and Democrats rarely do and it's backhanded when it happens, unless they're an Evan Bayh clone, but even that doesn't bother me much. It's just so stupid.
Politico spent two years covering RISING STAR Sarah Palin. By covering I mean they literally were the Sarah Palin daily. And yet...
One of the more entertaining thing about self-styled "centrists" (in DC "centrism" is not actually attached to anything resembling the political "center" of voters) is that they fancy themselves to be super pragmatic, but they're always yammering on about how Mike Bloomberg or whoever the latest Great White Hope is, needs to start a third party, get on the ballots in 50 states, appeal to a wider range of voters than 23 prominent op-ed columnists, and then, um, win the presidency, or something.
Absent a meteor equivalent, there is basically no path for a third party candidate to win the presidency. Just getting on the damn ballots in enough states is hard. But, yah, you're the sensible pragmatic ones.
Such tremendous concern for the wellbeing of 30 genocidal racists from out of town.
Some D.C. leaders and Metro’s largest union are outraged at the transit agency for allowing its trains to be used to provide “special treatment” for white supremacists traveling to Foggy Bottom for Sunday’s Unite the Right rally in Washington.
D.C. Council members Robert C. White Jr. (D-At Large) and Charles Allen (D-Ward 6) said they were concerned and angered that police escorted Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler and a handful of other rally participants onto what they described as a “private” Metro car.
Otherwise "I actually have no idea what I'm talking about" but MY SENSE is that during the great housing boom/bubble of the aughts you could basically plunk down a housing development anywhere in the suburbs/exurbs with little political resistance. Now I'm regularly reading about suburban/exurban developments which are being blocked by locals in various ways, something I just don't remember from before.
There's also a little of chitchat about the horrible olds who are "aging in place" and refusing to downsize and sell their too big houses to the young people and moving to small condos more appropriate to their needs. Many municipalities don't allow the building of many smaller apartments/condos, particularly not ones that are of a slightly larger size that families might use (want to keep the poors out of the school district). Olds might not need their McMansions, but that doesn't mean they want to move into a 1 bedroom, especially when supply is so tight that it doesn't even save them much money. And apartments in a country without much tenant protection don't provide you with the kind of security that a paid off mortgage does.
Random unconnected and uninformed musings. Also this stuff varies from place to place of course. It's a blog!
Maybe this is obvious to everyone else, but I consistently marvel at the ability of absolutely horrible people to find each other and somehow sort of get along, at least temporarily. My conceptual model of the manipulative abuser is that he/she finds generally nice and capable suckers to exploit. It's basically a con, and the marks aren't necessarily bad people.
But Trump surrounds himself with all of the worst people. I suppose not every single one of them takes pleasure in torturing babies for sport, but they all strike you as people who would shiv their mothers-in-law, if not their mothers, for a few bucks. And they don't just have to deal with the horrible person who runs the show. They all have to deal with each other, too! I have no idea how this works for more than 2 hours.
A monster runs the CIA, though we knew that, but I was struck by something else in this news article about it.
ProPublica previously reported on cables from the Thailand black site, which also offered details of the C.I.A.’s methods. Like those documents, the new cables describe the waterboarding of Mr. Nashiri as well as the use of other torture techniques.
I'm not sure when they changed, but for years the New York Times almost never suggested or stated that waterboarding was torture.
I admit I have little patience actually trying to Enage With The Ideas of conservatives because the ones who aren't pure evil are just dumb and the things they write are dumb and it's difficult to argue with them because they're so dumb. I just want to take a big red pen and write "you are a dumbumdum" after every sentence.
Also the dumb conservatives have editors, who also must be dumb.
During most of my life, prominent media figures fell all over themselves to cash in on milking "The Greatest Generation" WWII nostalgia for all the cash and celebrity they could. That noble sacrifice, that commitment to a higher cause, the killing of a bunch of fucking Nazis.
A lot of the optimism about self-driving cars (and trucks) has been about highway driving which is, in many places, "easier" in some sense, though I think the "traveling at 65 mph" is more of a problem than people recognize given how well these things can actually "see," but what happens when something goes wrong? If I get in a little crash with another car on America's worst highway, the Schuylkill Expressway, unless the cars are totalled and we're dying, the other driver and I can likely find a way to pull our cars off to the side of the road within some reasonable timeframe so that 5,000 other drivers don't have to discover the joys of free parking. This type of thing is not an easy problem for the robot driver to deal with.
Man who runs big piece of internet does not understand how internet works.
"It's worth noting that at least some of the content Alex Jones published on other platforms (e.g., Facebook and YouTube) that led to them taking enforcement against him would have also violated our policies had he posted it on Twitter," Harvey wrote. "Had he done so, we would have taken action against him as well."
But a CNN review of Jones' accounts show that all of the videos that initially led the other tech companies to take action against Jones were in fact posted to Twitter by Jones or InfoWars. All were still live on Twitter as of the time this article was published. CNN noted this in a request for comment from Twitter on Wednesday morning, before Harvey's email was made public. The company declined to comment at the time.
For reasons I've mostly forgotten I can't stand Sarah Jeong! Still the right wing "the minority is the Real Racist for mocking racists" attempt to get her fired was bad as these things always are, as is how she's been treated by her new bosses and colleagues.
Very even handed analysis of one person's experience working for AmeriCorps. I learned a lot about the program and am glad I was pointed to the article. Overall, this person was glad she spent the year in service, but the program definitely needs some tweeks.
BREAKING: the Puerto Rico govt, tonight, is submitting a report to Congress that states: “On June 13, 2018, the Government of Puerto Rico revealed that there were 1,427 more deaths in the four months after the hurricanes than normal (based on the previous four years)...”
Most deaths in the aftermath of any sort of natural disaster aren't easily directly attributed to the event. Most aren't "tornado blows over tree which lands on man's head" or "man drowned in floodwaters during hurricane" type things. The only really to get at how many deaths were really attributable to the event and its aftermath (lack of power and water leading to heat-related deaths, for example) are to measure the number of deaths relative to the "normal" amount during a similar time period.
For years various thinktankeries have published country "corruption indices." I'm not going to get into the details of any of them because I am a lazy blogger, but I was always struck how if you exclude the kinds of corruption that are standard in the US but not elsewhere then the US comes out looking pretty good. Putting it roughly, our system of legalized bribery is usually enough of a Rube Goldberg machine that one can pretend it does not exist, while in other countries the suitcases of cash just get dropped on the table in plain sight. That we have our own corruption - infecting elites across government, journalism, and business - is not new, though here, too, Trump is in a way saying the quiet part out loud, or more accurately the Rube Goldberg machine was too complicated for him to operate so he just junked it.
I gather that in general people trying to develop autonomous vehicles are aware of this basic problem, though someone whose name rhymes with Devon Tusk seems to not give a shit, but you can't keep ratcheting up "driver assist" features if they don't work very well. The instant drivers start relying on them, instead of just perceiving them as an emergency failsafe, they stop paying attention.
The IIHS says these tests are just the start, and they’ll expand on them as more cars with more features hit the market, and work with international safety bodies like the UK’s Thatcham. But they already highlight the balancing act that automakers are having to pull off. If their systems are too capable, then they risk the driver’s attention wandering, which is a criticism leveled against Tesla and may have led to a fatal collision in northern California in March.
But if they’re too simplistic, they’re just frustrating to use, and drivers won’t bother. And the basic safety systems, at least, do save lives. IIHS says preventing lane departure crashes alone would save 8000 lives per year. Tesla makes bold safety claims for its Autopilot suite, which are hard to check without data, but the company says it does plan to release regular safety statistics, starting later this quarter, as promised by Elon Musk. He also says his cars are going to get more capable with software updates, changing lane for themselves, for example.
Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell The Daily Beast that Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the infamous former Apprentice star who followed Trump to the White House, secretly recorded conversations with the president—conversations she has since leveraged while shopping her forthcoming “tell-all” book, bluntly titled UNHINGED.
The thing about horrible people is that they attract other horrible people and then they all do horrible things. It's almost funny! Well, almost.
I don't get the apparent belief that someone's going to "win" the self-driving vehicle technology race and then be the only player and collect monopoly rents. Everybody's working on it! Obviously I don't think anyone's going to "win" at all anytime soon, but there seems to be this "whoever gets to the finish line first collects the whole prize" belief.
A year after his initial estimate that Waymo was likely a $75 billion startup, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas raised it to a staggering $175 billion, citing greater revenue potential from passenger ride services and licensing of its tech. The biggest source of future revenue, however, is likely to come from autonomous trucking and delivery services, which Jonas thinks could generate as much as $90 billion.
Just a rogue unaccountable kidnapping and child trafficking organization. Everyone who works for them should be in prison.
On July 18, a cargo van transporting eight Central American mothers separated from their children under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy crashed into a pickup truck in San Marcos. An ICE contractor was taking the women from a detention center near Austin to the South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall to be reunited with their kids. Even though police said the van was too damaged to continue driving and the women reported injuries, ICE repeatedly denied the crash ever took place.
A former female employee told Kotaku that she was asked “How big is your e-peen?” by an interviewer who was questioning her over her gaming habits. Another former Riot employee, who is passionate about tabletop games, said she was told by an interviewer that her gaming preferences meant she wouldn’t be considered a “gamer” at Riot. Another woman, who was interviewing for a position far removed from games or game development, said she felt like she wasn’t being taken seriously because, instead of playing League of Legends, she casually played World of Warcraft. A few months into her employment, she felt that her suspicions were confirmed at a 2016 global Riot conference talk by a senior producer.
“Here at Riot Games, we hire gamers,” he said in his talk to an audience of Riot employees, audio of which was obtained by Kotaku. “If you’re not a core gamer, you need to over-index in another area.” Whether it’s finance, development facilities, player support, he said, “I don’t give a shit. You’re better if you’re a gamer.” For six minutes, the producer recounted a story of his experience preparing to raid the original World of Warcraft’s Naxxramas dungeon, introduced in 2006. It was 300 hours of raiding into his game, and he detailed the effort, the passion, and the grit it took for him to attain the opportunity. And then, before the raid, his internet died, and he let down his team. The experience gave him an “acid turn” in his stomach, he said, and has become a story he’s kept in his pocket for a decade. “Think of your story,” he demands. “If you don’t have one, get one. I’m serious.”
I think it's great that obsessive stereotypical nerd behavior is now just as cool as, I dunno, obsessive sports fan behavior or obsessive amateur golfer behavior or whatever. No need for nerd interests to be "uncool" any more than dozens of other basically similar pointless (though maybe fun!) activities. Yay nerds, you won. Also that nerd in "Revenge of the Nerds" raped the cheerleader.
But trying to kill the imaginary dragon, or whatever the fuck, is just as stupid as hitting a little golf ball around or listening to 4 hours of sports talk radio daily or knowing who Paul Ryan is. Like most hobbies, obsession with them is not "cool" it's just some thing you like to do, and is probably totally and justifiably seen as dumb and weird to normies.
Also engaging in sexism and workplace discrimination over imaginary dragons is probably not the best way to level up in the game of love.
ST. LOUIS • Fueled by more than $15 million in campaign spending and laser-sharp attention from national labor unions, voters solidly rejected an attempt to make Missouri a “right to work” state.
But hundreds of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and interviews with former administration officials tell a different story — of a previously unknown triumvirate that hovered over public servants without any transparency, accountability or oversight. The Mar-a-Lago Crowd spoke with VA officials daily, the documents show, reviewing all manner of policy and personnel decisions. They prodded the VA to start new programs, and officials travelled to Mar-a-Lago at taxpayer expense to hear their views. “Everyone has to go down and kiss the ring,” a former administration official said.
All told, 43 percent of self-identified Republicans said that they believed “the president should have the authority to close news outlets engaged in bad behavior.” Only 36 percent disagreed with that statement. When asked if Trump should close down specific outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, nearly a quarter of Republicans (23%) agreed and 49 percent disagreed.
Trump told his Tampa rally crowd that his team had set up "a tremendous movie screen" so all the people stuck outside could watch. There was no screen at all. https://t.co/KsXWcjyErtpic.twitter.com/QEMkiFrccy
Trump lies all the time, of course. The best you can say is he has so little interest in telling the truth that he barely distinguishes truth from falsehoods. But there's lying and there's believing the fantasy world that your brain has created. All the way back to lying about inauguration crowd sizes this distinction has been important. Trump wasn't really lying about the crowd sizes. He believed his fantasy and expected others (Spicer etc.) around him to maintain it.
I'm sure he's always been a bit like this, but... not quite like this.
