I can help with that. I, like you, also thought that there would be no reason to, so why would they do it... But then I went and watched the actual Q&A recording that all of the "Trump wants to put all the Muslims into a database" claims came from and find that the claim is quite false. He never says it. He says something that when taken entirely out of context can be interpreted by someone with preconceived notions as meaning it, except that in context it is actually very clear that he's talking about something else. I don't like Trump, and I don't want him to be our President, but the amount of seemingly fabricated stories about him are upsetting.
The irony is that some of the NYT articles about Trump themselves constitute aggressive misinformation if not fake news. I'm thinking in particular about the hit piece they put out about his relationship with women.
Trump's statements are usually non-specific and often contradictory. He's made denials that go far beyond straining credulity.
Basically, I think it's fair to say that people aren't fabricating stories so much as grasping at straws. Much like his supporters.
The only real way to understand Trump is as a textbook case of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Or maybe some surreal parody of NPD. Once you understand that his primary and in many cases sole motivation is self-aggrandizement and attention seeking[1], everything he says makes so much sense. Or rather, you stop searching for the earnest, substantive policies and opinions. He's alot like an adolescent in that regard--his opinions are based on an immature and highly self-referential worldview. Sometimes his points and counter-points seem well-grounded until you realize that he's literally parroting an argument he's read or heard elsewhere, without any serious attempt at critical assessment or application. The fact that they're all over the board (as opposed to consistently preferring a particular narrative) is only more evidence of this methodology. Again, it's basically the methodology of an adolescent.
You cannot identify anything concrete about Trump's policies, and you cannot predict what Trump will do, without understanding that. And once you do, you realize that you _still_ cannot identify or predict anything. You can't even predict whether he'll be a devastating president, become more popular than the second-coming of Christ, or fit somewhere in-between. I mean, by most definitions he's successful. That means something... I'm just not sure what.
The only thing you can say for certain is that people acting intelligently and honestly would never vote such a man into the Presidency. That he's President-elect is a devastating testament to a deep pathology in American politics and culture.
[1] I don't even mean to use those terms derisively. They just seem so apt and obvious and beyond dispute. And I'm not using them to imply he's good or bad or right or wrong. The only way to come close to understanding the man and his behavior is with an almost clinical detachment. A Trump presidency is like a natural, cosmic phenomenon. Even the word cataclysmic doesn't work because it implies some subjective value judgment. His eventual policy decisions can and will be judged. But the man himself and his words... there's nothing you can really say. Just like there's nothing you can really say when a small child surprises you with some facially sophisticated argument that he's just echoing. The statement and the thought process behind them are basically immune from meaningful criticism. Put another way, in some sense both the child and Trump lack capacity for the same kind or degree of culpability of a typical adult. Yes, normally selfishness is frowned upon; but if it's the product of an abnormal mind, there's no value judgment to be made.
"The only thing you can say for certain is that people acting intelligently and honestly would never vote such a man into the Presidency. That he's President-elect is a devastating testament to a deep pathology in American politics and culture."
I feel the same way about Hillary: She defended a rapist husband, used the government as her personal piggy bank, used the mainstream media as her attack dog, and conspired against all of her enemies, and tried to steal the white house.
We also have PC culture run amok. Trump is a big 'Fuck You' many intelligent Americans have been waiting for, for many years. It has nothing to do with racism, sexism, or xenophobia.
The saddest thing? The fact that Wikileaks had to bring many of this to light. Julian Assange still hasn't been heard from since his power was cut at the embassy.
The Clinton Foundation is known to have directly misappropriated government donations. Donors to the organization also seem to have received preferential treatment from the State Department:
Other major conflicts of interest involved Russia and Haiti. If you need direct evidence of Hillary's involvement, focus on the 33k emails she deleted AFTER receiving a Congressional subpoena, emails that were originally sent from a private server expressly to avoid public disclosure FOIA requirements.
I had to find the emails the first article references by myself because they didn't link to them. I was drawn to because the pull quotes sounded out of context, and they are. The emails referenced dont say nearly what the article claims, it's extremely unclear how they came to their conclusion.
The second article you cite expressly avoids saying any preferential treatment was received, and notes the donation was unsolicited.
What major conflicts of interest involved Russia and Haiti? Both of those are a contradiction in terms - at what point would Clinton have multiple interests in them?
The 33k emails are gone, so I can't read them. You note they show her direct involvement. Direct involvement in what? How do you have access to the emails? Have you considered leaking them?
This is hilarious. Bill Clinton's right-hand man accuses Chelsea of misappropriating Clinton Foundation resources to pressure her into stopping her investigation into the way he handled Foundation finances and you think his accusation is "out of context" and "extremely unclear". It is precisely the context of the emails that make it so clear.
> The second article ... notes the donation was unsolicited.
And you apparently can't distinguish between a journalist reporting a fact ("Clinton Foundation admits breaking ethical rules") and the same journalist attributing a claim to a third party (yes, the "claim" that the donation was unsolicited comes directly from the Clinton Foundation).
You can Google Uranium One for Russia and earthquake recovery contracts for Haiti if you really want to dig into the patterns of criminal behavior, but I wouldn't worry about it. The FBI is confirmed to have multiple ongoing investigations into the Clinton Foundation. And we know for a fact that Clinton intentionally deleted work-related emails after getting subpoenaed by Congress, which is two felonies right there (obstruction of an investigation, and destruction of evidence). So throw out the claims that these are "extraordinary claims" with "no sourcing"... it's highly suggestive evidence of corruption with documented attempts to obstruct investigative work that continues to justify extensive Federal investigations.
If I find the emails Hillary put through the shredder I will let you know. Fortunately, there is enough to put her in jail based on the materials that have already been leaked.
You're iterating your talking points without explaining the previous state of them, so it's very tiring, so I have no interest in participating. None of my questions have been answered :( Your post reads as picking at my the wording of my questions because you feel it betrays sympathy for people who disagree with you, and it's bundled with even more extraordinary claims.
Before reading the following, please consider that I genuinely wish you well and think you're making an honest effort at staying out of ideological swamps. There's no need to feel that I'm judging you or your choice of sourcing, I'm only curious about this subject and genuinely want to learn more, so I'm trying to find more source material.
When no charges are bought after 4 years under a president and attorney general who have been thirsting to try her for anything, I hope you reconsider the fever swamp of information we've been discussing. These...news...sites contradict their own sources, and from the research I've done and the form of your answers, it seems impossible to find justification for their extraordinary claims.
> Your post reads as picking at my the wording of my questions
Nope, my complaint is that you write-off Hillary's destruction of federal records, multiple active criminal investigations, and suspicious evidence of pay-to-play (in direct violation of her ethics agreement) as nothing warranting suspicion. And then accuse anyone who points out these flagrant breaches of public trust of being mired in a "fever swamp" and making "extraordinary claims" instead of factual observations.
It is certainly possible that Clinton is guilty of no further crimes than those which have already been revealed, although I wouldn't be money on it. With that said, I'm glad to hear you support the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into HRC and the Clinton Foundation, and view it as an exonerating step that will redeem Hillary's questionable political legacy.
Where do authoritative sources come from? Government? Mainstream media?
I think "personal piggy bank" might refer to Clinton foundation donations and collusions, but don't expect it to be too easy to find that information, no time will be spend producing fancy interactive info-graphics to make that easier to understand...
> My MacBook Pro from 2011 goes all day with serious activity without a charge
As an owner of a 2011 MacBook Pro with a recently replaced battery, I don't believe you. We either don't share the same understanding of "all day", "serious activity", "without a charge", or "goes".
Well by serious activity I mean writing C++ all day in emacs and compiling it maybe a hundred times or more. And the usual web browsing, email throughout the day.
I can easily make it through a full work day doing this without plugging in the machine.
Running emacs practically counts as letting the machine idle these days. I know it used to be considered super bloated, but even fart apps use more resources now.
Amazon is known to be a disgusting swampy wasteland of intentionally deceptive knockoff garbage. Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice, and they know it, and they do nothing about it.
But that's not the interesting part. Consumer public need assurance that what they're being sold, NOT what they're buying, is safe. The difference is perspective. Regardless of provenance, it should never be the buyer's responsibility to gamble correctly on product safety.
You can buy a power strip with a two prong "figure 8" connector providing three grounded outlets. Try to sell that in a brick and mortar store, it would be closed, razed and the ground salted so they won't even try it next time.
A power strip like that isn't connected to the electrical ground in your house -- that would need a three-pin connection, and it only has a two-pin connection. Despite this, it has three-pin grounded sockets for you to connect appliances to it.
Three-pin appliances require a ground to be safe. By using a power strip like this, you're creating an unsafe configuration with a high risk of electric shock if there's a fault with an appliance.
Also, the little figure-8 connectors can't pass a high amount of current safely, and lots of 3-pin appliances are relatively high draw. That's a fire risk.
I'm not sure who's responsible for the enforcement in the US.
> Three-pin appliances require a ground to be safe
Can you elaborate on this?
My MacBook charger has both a two-prong and a three-prong cable. Why would it be any more dangerous to plug my MacBook into this power strip using the three-prong cable than to connect it directly to the wall with the two-prong cable?
Your MacBook then is prepared for ungrounded operations. Now take a laser printer, it uses very high voltage on the inside and if something gets dislodged and touches an outer facing metal part and you touch that in turn, you are dead. That's why the outer parts are connected to a safety ground. Do note Xerox warns you not to use a "cheater plug" http://download.support.xerox.com/pub/docs/4400/userdocs/any... . Laser printers are also a great example of when that C7/C8 connection is a fire hazard because laser printers need a lot of power when heating up their fusers. This is also why you must not connect a laser printer to a UPS.
The MacBook chargers are designed to be safe without grounding.
The grounding pin does have a use, though: some cheap powered USB devices will put out a voltage relative to ground on their '0v' lines. If you touch a MacBook that's plugged into one of these devices, you can get a small shock. If you're using a 3-pin adapter, this doesn't seem to happen.
Exactly! I do not even know whether it's a bigger fire hazard or shock hazard. In Canada, curiously enough, it's Health Canada who would enforce a recall notice and fine you into oblivion. Look up the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act for more.
They're describing a power strip that has a 2-prong wall connector and offers three 3-prong outlets. This is dangerous, because equipment with 3-prong plugs needs to be grounded, and this power strip misleads you into thinking you've done that.
I rent an old apartment in the US, and no law requires the landlord to ground the wiring, so I actually need a power strip like that so that I can plug the strip into the wall and also plug 3 pronged electronics to it.
I know that it offers no grounding, that's a risk I have no choice but to take on my equipment because my building is not grounded. So I'm not sure someone selling a strip like that would be fined if my landlord isn't even forced to ground the building.
In that situation there are three safe and legal answers:
* Replace the wiring with grounded cable. Expensive.
* Replace the outlet with a GFCI and label it "no equipment ground". Gives most of the safety benefits of a proper ground, and is up to code. Not that expensive.
* Use a cheater plug [1] and connect the external ground tab to a pipe or something else grounded.
What you're asking for is basically a cheater plug plus an ordinary power strip, sold as one integrated unit. Better to keep them separate so that people know what they're dealing with. Also, what the poster upthread was describing didn't have a grounding tab, so there was no way to hook it up safely.
(The landlord isn't required to set up grounded outlets out of a general principle that you only need to bring things up to code when you're modifying it, and that something that was legal at the time it was installed stays so. Your unit could legally have knob-and-tube wiring if it's old enough!)
You have 3 "holes" in your power strip outlets: Line, Neutral, and Ground. Now, a figure-8 can only have 2 wires inside it.
So, it's likely that you have Line and Neutral connected, while Ground is "floating" (not connected). Which means that, if something goes wrong inside the appliance, it can be dangerous for other appliances, and more importantly for you, too.
Especially if there are exterior metal parts inside the appliance that are grounded and a wire is touching the metal from the inside, too.
The little circular lugs sticking out of that adapter are grounding tabs. You're meant to connect them to an electrical ground (which is sometimes possible in the US by screwing it into the faceplate of the wall socket). That lets you safely use 3-prong devices in a house that only has 2-prong sockets.
Of course, lots of people mis-use them, and when they do they're unsafe. I assume they're still on sale because they have a safe and appropriate use.
EDIT: I, personally, would never have one of the linked adapters in my house, simply because the risk of someone being an idiot with it without realising is too great. (I also come from the UK, where our plug and socket designs are nothing less than straight up paranoid when it comes to safety, and the US electrical setup seems unnecessarily risky to me. At least it's lower voltage...)
By the way this american type of plug looks pretty dangerous as it must be easy to acidentally or intentionally touch the pins while inserting it into a socket.
"Their warehouse policy of arbitrarily mixing stock is actively customer hostile in practice"
There isn't a "warehouse policy" per se. As a seller, you can choose "Stickerless commingled inventory" as an alternative to individually barcode labelling each item before you ship it to the Amazon warehouse (or paying Amazon a handsome premium to label them for you).
The risk as a seller is that your items are commingled with counterfeit equivalents, and that your seller reputation could be affected as a result.
I don't spend $20/day on food in Boston or Paris. Does it really cost that in India? Are my nationalist blinders on? Somehow I imagined that it would be much cheaper there.
Although the third world can be surprisingly cheap, it is often surprisingly expensive. Add that to the cost of flights (a $990 round-trip flight to a place equals $33 a day if you stay a month) and things begin to add up. And although billions of people in the third world do eat for cheap, the cheap/local food and what you want to eat may not match up. Combine that with different prices for foreigners and your lack of local knowledge about cheap, good places and you'll be paying a lot more than you'd think.
Only go to places that maintain an illusion of hygiene and prices will rise fast. For example, you might pay the equivalent of $3 more per meal for a place whose employees wear gloves. But in reality, the dirty-looking place next door is actually cleaner; they throw lemon juice on their boards after cutting meat. At the same time the nicer-looking place lets raw chicken touch everything while handling money with the same gloves they use for food.
You can easily spend a tenth of that and get good food in India if you eat at places where the average local person does. However, speaking as an Indian, most foreigners probably don't want to play that crapshoot, because there is always a chance you'll get sick due to lack of hygiene in food prep.
The hotels that cater to Westerners typically charge a lot more, and rates are more comparable to hotels in a cheap European city. Theoretically, with them you get a guarantee of food that is prepared with better safety standards. Whether this is practically true I have no idea.
Ironically, the cheapest way to live and eat in India would be to rent an apartment and get a trustworthy cook to come in and cook fresh food for you every day. Your daily bill will be way less than $20. However, setting this up requires a fair amount of legwork and contacts, which (understandably) someone who is looking for a vacation will not find attractive.
> Theoretically, with them you get a guarantee of food that is prepared with better safety standards. Whether this is practically true I have no idea.
Anecdotally, working in Maharashtra with Indians in an Indian company for a few months I was never ill. This was eating $1 "luxury" 8 course meals brought to me in the morning by a dabbawalla on his motorbike which - as with all my co-workers' food - stayed out in the searing heat for a few hours before lunch; I also eventually had him bring me dinner. I lived in the same company housing as everybody else. No idea how you'd find a dabbawalla though, I just took the stack of leaflets dropped at the office and tried them all until I found a good one.
Coming back for 2 weeks to Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Bangalore staying at a famous and very nice 5 star hotel chain and eating only in their restaurants, I caught the worst bout of my life. Bit wary of hotel kitchens since then.
I realize this is a fucking gross idea that amounts to poop pills, but there is probably a market for a market for digestive inoculations against local bacteria. Being able to build up a resistance to the local gut bacteria in advance - before you have to commit 100% to all of the local fauna - would be invaluable. Gut bacteria almost certainly play a large part in that balance.
They exist. Cost me $15 at a local chemist (in Australia) to get an immunization for common stomach bugs in Southeast Asia/India). It also isn't impossible to buy antibiotics before you go and to take them with you.
> Ironically, the cheapest way to live and eat in India would be to rent an apartment and get a trustworthy cook to come in and cook fresh food for you every day.
I met a seed-stage startup person who has this setup (somewhere in India) while traveling through a hostel in SF recently. Two meals cooked per day and cleaning. It sounded like a great setup and much more affordable than what that would cost in the US.
If you are travelling in Boston or Paris (e.g. not cooking your own meals) $20 is really a pretty restrictive budget. Scaling your expectations elsewhere similarly will mean you can probably also do it on a lot less in India...
You mean eating out? When I'm traveling on a budget, I tend to just buy bread and cheese in a grocery store, and use a knife (or whatever I can improvise) to make a meal on the go.
Although I agree with you it's also worth pointing out that very often the bread and cheese _is_ the local food. Even in places that aren't known for their cheese, if you head to a market you might find an inexpensive, unique and rather tasty cheese.
No, that's not healthy. I didn't say "eat nothing but bread and cheese". If someone recommends you try the bonbons in France, do you eat 3 meals a day of only bonbons for 30 days? When people suggest you try a food they usually aren't suggesting you try and make it your entire diet. I was instead recommending eating the local bread and cheese (of course in moderation.) For the places I've lived in this holds:
- NYC? Get a bagel with cream cheese, or a chopped cheese ($3).
- Idaho Falls? Go to Reed's Dairy and the bakery by the public library with free samples (can't remember the name.) Amazing stuff, and pretty cheap.
- Netherlands? Cheese is pretty cheap and good quality everywhere in the country. Bread is incredibly cheap, and even if you're literally surviving off change you find on the sidewalk you can afford it.
- New Hampshire? Go to Cabot Cheese. Best cheddar in the world.
Of course also remember to eat fruits and veggies, but those are always cheap. I just bought 3 large peppers and a kilo of apples for €1.50 here in the Netherlands.
There's nothing wrong with inexpensive food. You should try the bagel and schmear in nyc, and if you haven't had pork belly buns, tacos de lengua, or pupusas con curtido you should drop what you're doing and fix that. All of those are amazing. Pupusas, in particular, are pork and cheese in a pancake.
Cabot cheese is the best cheddar though? That's fighting words if you grew up near Wisconsin. If you're ever near there go to Bobby Nelson Cheese Shop. The aged cheddar is amazing and they make their sausage.
Have you tried Cabot's whole assortment? For a few weeks a year they lay out a truly ridiculous assortment of cheeses, all free to try. Their hyper-local stuff kicks the ass of the (still fantastic) Cabot you'll buy in the grocery store. What you guys get in Wisconsin trucked across the country is probably not even close to what I ate when I lived a stone's throw from Cabot.
Also, my tastes run seriously sharp. Does Bobby Nelson have anything really sharp? If so I've got to check it out.
Secretly, my favorite cheddar - which I'd bet trumps Bobby Nelson, even if Cabot's hidden stuff doesn't - is made by an older woman who wraps all her cheeses in black paper and sells them at various markets around the Quechee Gorge. But it's somewhat expensive and very hard to find. The last time I bought some I weighed it before and after eating to make sure nobody else touched it, it's that good.
If you want to get more global, try obscure Welsh cheddars. Amazing but expensive. They go very well in between scotches.
I know I might be shooting myself in the foot here by posting this.
I got so annoyed by Facebook's banal trending news suggestions that I wrote a script to flag every trending news item as offensive (on the premise that it is the flag most likely to have lasting effect). I never see trending news on Facebook anymore after running that for a while.
