@subtledoctor "
Pasteurization does not make it "processed food..." it simply heats up the milk to kill bacteria."
No, it is. Pasteurization is a process. That doesn't make it bad. Again, "Processed Food" is a completely meaningless term. Cooking food makes it processed.
Whoa, what if you use your 'food processor' to make a smoothie? I guess that's now 'processed' and thus bad for you!
The moment you stop strict regulation of food production is the moment you just wrote a death sentence for thousands of people. It's absurd to think individual citizens have the means, time or capacity to do so on their own. What's the idea behind this libertarian view?? That if enough people get extremely sick or die that the company will suffer in the marketplace?? That's an almost sociopathic worldview.
The moment you stop strict regulation of food production is the moment you just wrote a death sentence for thousands of people. It's absurd to think individual citizens have the means, time or capacity to do so on their own. What's the idea behind this libertarian view?? That if enough people get extremely sick or die that the company will suffer in the marketplace?? That's an almost sociopathic worldview.
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Umm, lots of people did die before we had things like pasteurization and food safety regulations and, generally, public health science...
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What part of "private certificates" you don't get? Don't buy food from "suspicious" companies unless you are desperate and worth the risk. IF the government say "this food is OK" and the food is not, then nobody happens. If the same happens with an private company, they will lose market. Same with bribes and etc. Regulators aren't saints. Regulatory capture is a reality.
Also, regulations can prevent innovation. If the regulation say "you need to do A" and you find an better way to do A, you can't do that. And prevents that the market can adapt. For example, in food, if an natural disaster occours in a big region, regulations will only slow down the recovery of food production of this region that can start in one day without it.
IF the government say "this food is OK" and the food is not, then nobody happens.
On the contrary, if food isn't safe, people will get sick, people will realize the food is responsible, and people will realize that whoever was inspecting the establishment was letting standards slide--in which case those inspectors would lose their jobs, and probably never be able to work in the industry again. Whenever there's an inspection, there's a record of who conducted the inspection and what they found, and if their inspections fail to find a problem, there's a record of their incompetence. Inspectors are not anonymous; their activities are carefully logged. If an inspector isn't keeping careful documentation, they'd lose their jobs anyway.
History has shown that regulating food reduces death and improves health. The United States has very rigorous standards for food safety and it's extremely rare for people to get seriously ill from poorly-run establishments. When a company has to comply with frequent inspections, and when inspections are documented so that inspectors can't hide their involvement in a failed inspection, the company doesn't have the opportunity to dodge regulations.
China has very weak regulations and very weak mechanisms to enforce them. Bribing government officials is easy and the people aren't capable of forcing government officials to crack down on corruption because they don't have free, fair, and transparent elections. The net result? Food in China is notoriously unsafe, and it's not just restricted to street vendors--even respectable restaurants will routinely use expired food and fail to enforce hygiene standards, because they know they're not going to be shut down if they fail an inspection. There was an infamous trend in which restaurants would use oil scraped from the sewer to cook their food, and while there was ostensibly a crackdown, my friend Ma Di witnessed the same practice when we were at Beijing University of all places just a few years ago... within earshot of a campus police officer.
In the rare occasions where a company does manage to avoid government scrutiny, it takes years for them to lose market share. That's how slow and inefficient consumer backlash can be. It's not like consumers get to watch restaurant workers through a glass window and confirm that they're maintaining a clean environment.
Before the establishment of regulatory bodies like the FDA, food production was a hideously dangerous affair. Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle exposed grossly unsanitary practices at meatpacking plants, in which workers would constantly find rat feces dropped on meat and simply wipe it off with a glove rather than actually cleaning the meat or exterminating the rats.
The U.S. for one has already seen what unregulated food is like, both in our own history and in foreign countries in the present day. Companies don't spend time and money keeping their products safe because the market forces them to; they comply with inspections because the government forces them to.
"Compare it to owning land. We accept that people can exercise control over tracts of land, but the most important pieces of land--namely, roads and public spaces--are free to everyone."
Government owns roads, thus they are free to use for everyone, unless the government puts a toll on the road then there is a cost associated with the road that is passed down to the user.
This example, you are suggesting that the government takes control of the platform and allow free speech to flourish there. Sorry to say, I trust Zuckerberg more than I do any government to control it - and that is saying ALOT. And if a government gets their hands on a platform that has 2 billion users, expect there to be a toll placed on it ASAP so they can 1) generate revenue, 2) control the flow of information being supplied.
Also, I can't do whatever I want on a road. Here in Ottawa, I can't even start a street hockey game. I definitely can't run around naked on it (like I can on my private - out of public view - land) or do anything that may put another person in harms way on it. So if a company thinks one of their users may start causing harm or promote harm against another individual who also uses that platform, then yes, that company has every right to put a stop to it.
I think Internet companies learnt their lesson from the downfall of Yahoo! where mass advertisers pulled ads from all of their sites after it was reported that their ads were being displayed on user created content like chatrooms that were pedophilic in nature. Yahoo didn't control (or even attempt to control) what their user base was creating (and even if it was just a small handful of users), put children at danger in the process, and faced enough backlash from it that literally usurped them from their Internet throne.
Free speech can happen anywhere. If ideas are strong enough, they will flourish regardless of the platform that is being presented. These ideas do not even have to be right, or morally bound. Just look at the Q movement that started obscurely on one of the Chans and flourished.
But no site should be compelled to carry that message or any message just because of their reach. If a persons message isn't being heard on a site, they will just go elsewhere.
I don’t get it. Is he not allowed to seek employment?
Or are you assuming he was hired because of his past role in the Trump administration and not his military background that a lot of other board members have?
I mean, he oversaw an administration that created policies which directly led to fat government contracts for that company. He is now going to personally profit, handsomely, from policies his administration put in place.
That is more or less the definition of corruption. Sure someone can seek enployment, but we also put reasonable limits on certain people's future employment, all the time. This sure seems to be a situation where that would be appropriate...
So you think Kelly directly had influence on the administrations position when it came these policies that were set? Is there proof to this, or is there just perception?
If he left the administration to take this job, id’d be throwing flags, but that wasn’t the case.
He's wealthy, he has power, he must be corrupt. The only time that doesn't apply is if the wealthy person is a Democrat...
Edit: Because wealthy Democrats give all of their money to the poor, never try to make more money than they need, and are just all-around great human beings. Or, maybe it's just that the press isn't digging into every aspect of their lives...
Because wealthy Democrats give all of their money to the poor, never try to make more money than they need, and are just all-around great human beings. Or, maybe it's just that the press isn't digging into every aspect of their lives...
I mean, he oversaw an administration that created policies which directly led to fat government contracts for that company. He is now going to personally profit, handsomely, from policies his administration put in place.
That is more or less the definition of corruption. Sure someone can seek enployment, but we also put reasonable limits on certain people's future employment, all the time. This sure seems to be a situation where that would be appropriate...
So you think Kelly directly had influence on the administrations position when it came these policies that were set? Is there proof to this, or is there just perception?
This isn't some new quandary that we have to figure out; there is a long-accepted way to put to rest concerns about corruption and conflicts of interest. You oblige such figures to avoid "even the appearance of impropriety." It's a really simple bright-line rule, very easy to follow, and it puts all doubts to rest. It is a bit of a burden on the public figures subject to it, but they are grown-ups and can decide for themselves whether they want to be in that position.
John Kelly knows that perfectly well. When he abandons such clarity and in effect says "just trust me, nothing corrupt about it," he invites suspicion and creates division. I mean, what makes him appropriate for such a position - his long history and experience with youth detention? Spoiler: no. It's a 'thank you' by Caliburn. If this sort if thing was done by an official under my jurisdiction, you can be damn sure a criminal investigation would be opened to scrutinize whether his future position might have been discussed before his departure...
The Trump administration has more or less made it S.O.P. to embrace conflicts of interest, and asking that we simply trust that they won't take advantage. It doesn't work that way; and everyone who has been in piblic service knows it doesn't work that way, including Republicans. The wholesale abandonment of professional ethics by Republicans is one of thise head-scratchers that leaves me confused and disappointed. You don't care about the concept of conflicts of interest anymore, just because your guy is in the oval office? Why is everyone on the Right so willing to discard their principles, for the most ridiculous Republican to ever represent the party?
So everyone on the board is there because the company was saying thank you? Or just him, because it is the easiest thing to assume. I see the military connection more than I see a Trump administration connection. What makes ex military leaders the right choice for the their board? I have no clue, but the company must have a reasoning behind it.
Kelly is on the board of the company before being in the Administration. As head of DHS and as Chief of Staff, he is instrumental in implementing policies that VASTLY increase both the size and scope of their government contracts, he leaves the Administration, and less than 6 months later, he is BACK on the board. This isn't rocket science. Of course, this comes on the heels of the news, revealed in emails, that the Administration never had ANY INTENTION of reuniting children with their parents at ANY point. They never even bothered to put the information they would have needed to do so in a rudimentary database. Shit, even an Excel spreadsheet would have been preferable to this:
Lies on top of lies on top of lies, with a side a malicious cruelty, then more lies, and some more lies on top of that. They lie to Congress, they lie to the Courts, they can't even BOTHER to actually implement their policy with basic bookkeeping. The plan here seems to have been to separate the children from their families and then just say "fuck it, mission accomplished" and scatter all the information to the wind, with kids being flown to every corner of the country to detention center like the one John Kelly is now using to haul home a bed full of cash, while their parents are deported or unable to contact them for (as the article states) up to TWO YEARS!!!! But I'm sure any conservative parent reading this would be perfectly fine if they got arrested for jay-walking in 2018, had their kid shipped off to some camp in Texas, and didn't see them again until 2020. No harm, no foul. And they'd also be absolutely thrilled that the White House Chief of Staff who oversaw this policy was PROFITING off the fact that your kid was in government custody. This country has turned into a moral cesspool, and I'm not half as mad at the people who implement it as I am at the voters who excuse it day after day.
The corruption, incompetence and malfeasance are just off the charts. You can't keep up even if you immerse yourself in it day after day. And if you DO immerse yourself in it day after day, the reaction of some people will be to become completely numb to it, and for most of the others, it will instill nothing but a sense of resigned dread that nothing is going to stop it, discouraging them from even attempting to keep fighting it. Which is precisely the point and how ALL authoritarian takeovers take shape. And it just continues to unravel, and one day in the near future, alot of people are going to wake up and say "Jesus, what the hell happened, how did we get HERE??" And the answer will have been screaming at them the entire time.
Kelly is on the board of the company before being in the Administration. As head of DHS and as Chief of Staff, he is instrumental in implementing policies that VASTLY increase both the size and scope of their government contracts, he leaves the Administration, and less than 6 months later, he is BACK on the board. This isn't rocket science. Of course, this comes on the heels of the news, revealed in emails, that the Administration never had ANY INTENTION of reuniting children with their parents at ANY point. They never even bothered to put the information they would have needed to do so in a rudimentary database. Shit, even an Excel spreadsheet would have been preferable to this:
Lies on top of lies on top of lies, with a side a malicious cruelty, then more lies, and some more lies on top of that. They lie to Congress, they lie to the Courts, they can't even BOTHER to actually implement their policy with basic bookkeeping. The plan here seems to have been to separate the children from their families and then just say "fuck it, mission accomplished" and scatter all the information to the wind, with kids being flown to every corner of the country to detention center like the one John Kelly is now using to haul home a bed full of cash, while their parents are deported or unable to contact them for (as the article states) up to TWO YEARS!!!! But I'm sure any conservative parent reading this would be perfectly fine if they got arrested for jay-walking in 2018, had their kid shipped off to some camp in Texas, and didn't see them again until 2020. No harm, no foul. And they'd also be absolutely thrilled that the White House Chief of Staff who oversaw this policy was PROFITING off the fact that your kid was in government custody. This country has turned into a moral cesspool, and I'm not half as mad at the people who implement as I am at the voters who excuse it day after day.
No, he was on a different board, for a different company that now owns Caliburn. If it was an issue, why wasn't it addressed when DC Capital Partners bought Caliburn? Shouldn't that be the corruption issue being looked at. Did Kelly tip off his old employer about what the government was about to do?
Maybe it has to do with both the government and companies that deal with the government has been doing this for ever, case in point Halliburton.
And I have never agreed with the policies of separating children or how it was handled, or who is in charge of it and if the American people also don't agree with it, it should be an issue at the next election as well as the alleged, or potential corruption that may come from government workers being hired by companies that take government contracts.
Because wealthy Democrats give all of their money to the poor, never try to make more money than they need, and are just all-around great human beings. Or, maybe it's just that the press isn't digging into every aspect of their lives...
Oh wow, speculative whataboutism. Innovative!
Speculative? I remember a blind-eye being turned on Slick Willy back in the day. That was the start of my eyes being opened to how biased the press is. Remember Dan Quayle being ridiculed as being 'stupid'? I do. Remember Bush Sr. being ridiculed as 'out if touch'? I do. Remember Bob Dole being ridiculed as 'mean spirited'? I do. It was all fun and games back before Fox News. Now there's an alternative. Too bad they're just as biased in the other direction to the point that I find it unwatchable. People like the rest of my family watch it religiously though. Seems to me like the news media's power and credibility dropped as soon as their monolithic viewpoints were challenged.
I can't stand this asshole we have as president but I'm afraid that all of this grandstanding and hysteria on the left is going to backfire and we're going to get another 4 years of this crap. No, I'm not the 3-eyed Raven but im starting to get a bad feeling in my gut. That and the economy is doing pretty well. Lost in all of this is the fact that Trump's economic policies might actually be working...
I interpreted your comment as saying that we would know about just as much corruption from Democrats as we have seen in the Trump administration if only the media would pay attention. My thoughts on that are:
1) I'm very skeptical that it's true. I think the Trump administration stands apart, at least since Nixon, in its level of corruption. And as you suggest, there's a substantial right-wing media apparatus these days that's more than happy to investigate Democrats.
2) If it is true, I hope those Democrats go to prison.
3) Either way, it should not be a basis for tolerating the corruption we already know about.
3) Either way, it should not be a basis for tolerating the corruption we already know about.
This is it.
No matter what, you can't excuse your team because "maybe those other guys are corrupt!" That's just a signal to your team to cheat and rob you.
check this out..
Tucker Carlson, who inherited a vast fortune from the Swanson frozen foods family fortune before being paid 10s of millions of dollars per year at Fox News, pretends to be a man of the people.
Why? Why talk about "racist trees" when your team is about to rob the working class and pass tax cuts for the rich? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNineSEoxjQ
Why an “out-of-the-closet elitist” rails against the “ruling class.”
Because wealthy Democrats give all of their money to the poor, never try to make more money than they need, and are just all-around great human beings. Or, maybe it's just that the press isn't digging into every aspect of their lives...
Oh wow, speculative whataboutism. Innovative!
Speculative? I remember a blind-eye being turned on Slick Willy back in the day. That was the start of my eyes being opened to how biased the press is. Remember Dan Quayle being ridiculed as being 'stupid'? I do. Remember Bush Sr. being ridiculed as 'out if touch'? I do. Remember Bob Dole being ridiculed as 'mean spirited'? I do. It was all fun and games back before Fox News. Now there's an alternative. Too bad they're just as biased in the other direction to the point that I find it unwatchable. People like the rest of my family watch it religiously though. Seems to me like the news media's power and credibility dropped as soon as their monolithic viewpoints were challenged.
I can't stand this asshole we have as president but I'm afraid that all of this grandstanding and hysteria on the left is going to backfire and we're going to get another 4 years of this crap. No, I'm not the 3-eyed Raven but im starting to get a bad feeling in my gut. That and the economy is doing pretty well. Lost in all of this is the fact that Trump's economic policies might actually be working...
If it's grandstanding to think that the President declaring himself totally above the law (and having his Attorney General agree with him), then we're screwed anyway. The official position of the Administration, and Republicans in general, is that if a President feels an investigation into him is unfair, he can simply end it because it is within his power to do so. This feeling would likely apply to roughly 99% of people who have ever been investigated or accused of a crime. They are refusing to even entertain the idea of answering Congressional subpoenas, as if the very nature of the House of Representatives itself is some kind of cute little side-game rather than a co-equal branch of government. ALL THREE of his Attorneys General have lied to Congress, and we have concrete proof based on the letter that came out on Thursday that Bill Barr just flat-out perjured himself when he said Mueller did not have any issues with his summary. The Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, brazenly lying to Congress to protect one man. Meanwhile, we have bribes and favors exchanging hands at every Trump property the world over. Hysteria?? If this isn't worth getting upset or concerned about, what is?? What's the point where we should be up in arms?? What's the bar at this point, that anything short of murder is just business as usual??
Then I guess he should be impeached then. Good luck with that. The worst part is that if Trump is impeached, I actually like Pence even less than him. Yay...
Let me mention something that happened in the last 24 hours. Last night Hillary Clinton say down with Rachel Maddow for an interview. And she engaged in a simple thought exercise I have done a hundred times in this thread, which is "what is she had done it". She then gives an example, nearly word for word, of what Trump said to Russia during the campaign, except she substitutes another country for the hypothetical she is presenting, which is "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns". Again, she is being 1000% percent clear she is presenting this as an example of what the uproar would be or have been if she had said this in 2016.
Fast forward to today. What do you imagine FOX News does. They could just present clips of the interview as usual, maybe call her a sore loser of something along those lines. But no. Do you know what they do instead?? They PURPOSEFULLY leave out every single bit of the obvious context of the conversation, focus only on the "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns" and then frame the story as if she is actually asking China to do this, rather than presenting a hypothetical. And now every person who watched this segment on FOX today believes that is what happened. Now, throw aside the monumental hypocrisy of someone who is able to be upset about her saying something like this and not Trump for the moment. Everyone involved in these segments on FOX knew FULL WELL that what Hillary was saying was a what if, tables were turned hypothetical scenario. No one with a single functioning brain cell could think otherwise. And they deliberately cut up the clip to make it seem like she was actually calling for China to hack Trump's tax returns.
This is not getting a story wrong, or being burned by a source. It is making a conscious decision to purposefully lie to millions of people ON PURPOSE to get them to believe something that isn't only not true, but is practically the opposite of true. In the same clip they altered, Hillary goes on to say how absurd it would be if anyone did say such a thing as she was presenting as a example. And you have millions of FOX viewers who now take it as gospel truth that Hillary asked China to hack Trump's tax returns. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why 33% of the country is basically brainwashed. Because they are being deliberately manipulated and lied to in the most cynical way imaginable. And the thing is, I could have predicted they would do this the moment I watched her interview last night.
And to be perfectly honest, after nearly 15 years of watching and hearing this stuff, I am at a total loss as to how to combat it. If you have absolutely no shame, it is not only easy to engage in this kind of misinformation, but the fact is, it works. It works better than people can possibly imagine. I rolled over to the FOX News comment section about the story a few minutes ago, and the general consensus is that (I shit you not) Hillary was serious last night, but that Trump was the one who was joking during the campaign in 2016. I mean, at a certain point, it's hard to not just want to throw in the towel. No amount of outreach is going to penetrate this. You'd have had an easier time deprogramming the people at Jonestown or Heaven's Gate.
On the contrary, if food isn't safe, people will get sick, people will realize the food is responsible, and people will realize that whoever was inspecting the establishment was letting standards slide--in which case those inspectors would lose their jobs, (...).
Then there is a problem. What if big industries capture the regulators to require that everyone uses an very long process that is insanely expensive for small business? A lot of people has problems with monopolies, but ALL monopolies that exist on the human history was created by the state. Direct like East India Company or indirect, like insane amount of regulations
History has shown that regulating food reduces death and improves health. The United States has very rigorous standards for food safety and it's extremely rare for people to get seriously ill from poorly-run establishments. When a company has to comply with frequent inspections, and when inspections are documented so that inspectors can't hide their involvement in a failed inspection, the company doesn't have the opportunity to dodge regulations.
China has very weak regulations and very weak mechanisms to enforce them. Bribing government officials is easy and the people aren't capable of forcing government officials to crack down on corruption because they don't have free, fair, and transparent elections. .
China has much more regulations than USA. The main difference? When you have so many regulations, enforce then means that all economy breaks and the economy ""develops"" an disrespect by the rules and corruptions to survive and it leads to juridic instability. China, Brazil, Russia, all ultra centralized countries suffer for this problems. On USA, thanks to the regulations, the industry will become an oligopoly soon.
Before the establishment of regulatory bodies like the FDA, food production was a hideously dangerous affair. Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle exposed grossly unsanitary practices at meatpacking plants, in which workers would constantly find rat feces dropped on meat and simply wipe it off with a glove rather than actually cleaning the meat or exterminating the rats.
Don't buy meat without an private trusty institution saying that they care about hygiene and safety of their costumers.
Enforcement of regulations is precisely the problem in China. The government doesn't really follow the rule of law when it's inconvenient. It has nominal regulations on lots of different things, but when those regulations aren't enforced, nothing is actually being regulated.
It is not that the government has so many regulations that it can't enforce them all. The Chinese government is immensely powerful and can dictate all sorts of different rules if it wants to. It's perfectly capable of locking up ethnic minorities in concentration camps, violently assaulting scholars who disagree with Party policy, and forcing students to worship at the digital altar of their dictator for life Xi Jinping. The Chinese government is perfectly capable of making sure Chinese food is just as safe as American food.
The problem is that government officials choose not to enforce safety regulations because they get in the way of corporate profits. And as strange as it might sound, there's nothing the Chinese Community Party values more than corporate profits.
Speaking of China, today is the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth movement, anti-imperialist and pro-democracy protests in response to the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles. It's a key part of China's shift away from Yuan Shikai's dynasty and China's subservience to foreign powers, and a vital moment in their history.
In exactly one month, it will be the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the brutal Chinese Communist Party crackdown that left thousands of unarmed protestors dead.
Let me mention something that happened in the last 24 hours. Last night Hillary Clinton say down with Rachel Maddow for an interview. And she engaged in a simple thought exercise I have done a hundred times in this thread, which is "what is she had done it". She then gives an example, nearly word for word, of what Trump said to Russia during the campaign, except she substitutes another country for the hypothetical she is presenting, which is "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns". Again, she is being 1000% percent clear she is presenting this as an example of what the uproar would be or have been if she had said this in 2016.
Fast forward to today. What do you imagine FOX News does. They could just present clips of the interview as usual, maybe call her a sore loser of something along those lines. But no. Do you know what they do instead?? They PURPOSEFULLY leave out every single bit of the obvious context of the conversation, focus only on the "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns" and then frame the story as if she is actually asking China to do this, rather than presenting a hypothetical.
...
This is not getting a story wrong, or being burned by a source. It is making a conscious decision to purposefully lie to millions of people ON PURPOSE to get them to believe something that isn't only not true, but is practically the opposite of true. In the same clip they altered, Hillary goes on to say how absurd it would be if anyone did say such a thing as she was presenting as a example.
This really gets to the heart of it. It's possible to misinterpret a quote, and that would be an honest mistake. And it's possible to put a partisan spin on an issue, and that would just be the result of a simple bias.
But this isn't an example of misinterpreting Clinton's words, and this isn't an example of partisan spin. This is just full-blown lying. There is no excuse for this, no defense for this, and no alternative interpretation for this. You simply can't get things that backwards by accident. There is no way they didn't know exactly what they were doing.
@SorcererV1ct0r I agree it's an interesting article and I have quite a lot of sympathy with it. I would though note it was written in 1996 and since then we've seen the emergence of the new tech firms. No doubt the authors would refer to these as just illustrating the dynamic competitive process - even if certain firms are approaching a monopoly position now, they are only able to maintain that position if they can provide better service and prices to customers than potential competitors. That though assumes that price and service are the only issues - we've seen significant question marks about the wider effects on society of having such dominant players in the new tech industries.
The article also doesn't refer at all to the idea of universal service, which was one of the main reasons for establishing public monopolies. The market will only provide a service if customers can afford to pay for it, which leads to a big disparity between rural and urban areas over things like utilities provision. A good example is the working of the Post Office in the UK. For a long time that had a monopoly over postal services and prices were universal and low, while service quality was generally high. In recent years the service in a number of areas has been opened up to competition. That's allowed significant drops in cost for some consumers - such as large firms making extensive use of parcel deliveries. However, without the ability to cross-subsidize, the Post Office (now Royal Mail) has had to increase the cost of the universal service and reduce service quality. They are also now agitating for a total end to the universal service obligation placed on them - saying, rightly, that it makes a nonsense of the idea of fair competition.
The example of post is not the only area where there's been a trend away from the idea of a level playing field for everyone. One interesting point though is that the availability of internet provision is an area where there's currently a trend towards that - the UK government has invested heavily in subsidizing the extension of the services funded by the market, in order to improve access to the internet in more rural areas.
How you can enforce regulations so big and complex that even the governemnt can't understand? Is like try enforce an law prohibiting people from dying. Regulations aways generate secondary effects who lead to more regulation who lead to more secondary effect until the regulations become ridiculous complex and people enforce only they partially;
Grond0, you are right, but IMO people who live in areas where is more expensive to deliver postals should pay more for it. Look to internet. Someone who lives in a montain on North part of Alaska will pay more for internet and get worse internet than soemone living in NY. There are advantages of living in rural areas, like less criminalty, but i don't like the idea of socialize the costs.
Let me mention something that happened in the last 24 hours. Last night Hillary Clinton say down with Rachel Maddow for an interview. And she engaged in a simple thought exercise I have done a hundred times in this thread, which is "what is she had done it". She then gives an example, nearly word for word, of what Trump said to Russia during the campaign, except she substitutes another country for the hypothetical she is presenting, which is "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns". Again, she is being 1000% percent clear she is presenting this as an example of what the uproar would be or have been if she had said this in 2016.
Fast forward to today. What do you imagine FOX News does. They could just present clips of the interview as usual, maybe call her a sore loser of something along those lines. But no. Do you know what they do instead?? They PURPOSEFULLY leave out every single bit of the obvious context of the conversation, focus only on the "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns" and then frame the story as if she is actually asking China to do this, rather than presenting a hypothetical.
...
This is not getting a story wrong, or being burned by a source. It is making a conscious decision to purposefully lie to millions of people ON PURPOSE to get them to believe something that isn't only not true, but is practically the opposite of true. In the same clip they altered, Hillary goes on to say how absurd it would be if anyone did say such a thing as she was presenting as a example.
This really gets to the heart of it. It's possible to misinterpret a quote, and that would be an honest mistake. And it's possible to put a partisan spin on an issue, and that would just be the result of a simple bias.
But this isn't an example of misinterpreting Clinton's words, and this isn't an example of partisan spin. This is just full-blown lying. There is no excuse for this, no defense for this, and no alternative interpretation for this. You simply can't get things that backwards by accident. There is no way they didn't know exactly what they were doing.
It gets worse, however, and goes to how after such tactics take place, FOX has then set the terms of the debate for the so-called centrist mainstream media. I just saw a headline I had missed about it from Politico, where it says she "seemingly" made a tongue-in-cheek comment about it. No Politico, there was no "seemingly" about it. That is what happened. But because they are so mortally afraid of being seen as biased by right-wing media, the centrist Beltway press will go out of their way to paint ANY situation as having two equally valid points of view. So now we have this story, even in non-FOX or AM radio outlets, being framed as "on the one hand, Secretary Clinton was making a point" and "on the other hand, she may have been secretly signalling to China to hack Trump" when only one of these is anywhere close to being reality. Rinse and repeat on nearly every story.
Moreover, I just watched the same clip on some Youtube channels, and the narrative has completely taken hold. And the lack of irony detection and willful obtuseness of so many of the comments leads me to belive we are in big trouble as a country. Because I've sampled the comment sections of multiple places on this topic last night and today, and I'm now convinced that people don't even need FOX News to purposefully cut the clip short, because they are more than capable on their own of watching the entire thing and completely missing the point simply because they want to. There are at least FIVE major tells as to the context of what she is talking about in the full clip. One is the entire 6 or 7 minutes of what was being talked about beforehand. The 2nd is that she literally uses the word "hypothetical". The 3rd is that she in that hypothetical talks about a 2020 candidate, and she isn't part of that field. The 4th is the tone of her voice. And the 5th is that she ends the entire thing by saying "the fact we are even talking about this shows how absurd the situation we find ourselves in is". It's one thing to lack context when shown a clip on FOX News. It's another to be presented the context and pretend it isn't there.
So Trump called and talked to Putin about the Mueller probe and as he called it the "Russian hoax".
So Trump's willing to talk to Putin about Mueller but was not willing to talk to Mueller about Putin.
And in that call did the so called President tell Putin that the Mueller Report contained information about Russia’s interference with our democracy?
Did Trump tell Putin that he’d not tolerate Russian election interference in the future? Did the President do this job or did he provide comfort and kiss the ass of our enemy?
Did the president give Putin the green light to do it again?
So Trump called and talked to Putin about the Mueller probe and as he called it the "Russian hoax".
So Trump's willing to talk to Putin about Mueller but was not willing to talk to Mueller about Putin.
And in that call did the so called President tell Putin that the Mueller Report contained information” about Russia’s interference with our democracy? Did Trump tell Putin that he’d not tolerate Russian election interference in the future? Did the President do this job or did he provide comfort and kiss the ass of our enemy?
Did the president give Putin the green light to do it again?
There is a small part of me (a very small part) that honestly wants a Democrat to get into office and start trying all this shit just so we can see HOW QUICKLY the opinions of millions of people would flip on a goddamn dime. Imagine if Obama had been found to have received the help of (through election interference), oh I don't know, Iran in the 2008 election. And then he has phone conversations with the Ayatollah and refuses to commit to protecting the elections in 2012. I'm sure that would have worked out just wonderfully for him.
Comments
Whoa, what if you use your 'food processor' to make a smoothie? I guess that's now 'processed' and thus bad for you!
What part of "private certificates" you don't get? Don't buy food from "suspicious" companies unless you are desperate and worth the risk. IF the government say "this food is OK" and the food is not, then nobody happens. If the same happens with an private company, they will lose market. Same with bribes and etc. Regulators aren't saints. Regulatory capture is a reality.
Also, regulations can prevent innovation. If the regulation say "you need to do A" and you find an better way to do A, you can't do that. And prevents that the market can adapt. For example, in food, if an natural disaster occours in a big region, regulations will only slow down the recovery of food production of this region that can start in one day without it.
History has shown that regulating food reduces death and improves health. The United States has very rigorous standards for food safety and it's extremely rare for people to get seriously ill from poorly-run establishments. When a company has to comply with frequent inspections, and when inspections are documented so that inspectors can't hide their involvement in a failed inspection, the company doesn't have the opportunity to dodge regulations.
China has very weak regulations and very weak mechanisms to enforce them. Bribing government officials is easy and the people aren't capable of forcing government officials to crack down on corruption because they don't have free, fair, and transparent elections. The net result? Food in China is notoriously unsafe, and it's not just restricted to street vendors--even respectable restaurants will routinely use expired food and fail to enforce hygiene standards, because they know they're not going to be shut down if they fail an inspection. There was an infamous trend in which restaurants would use oil scraped from the sewer to cook their food, and while there was ostensibly a crackdown, my friend Ma Di witnessed the same practice when we were at Beijing University of all places just a few years ago... within earshot of a campus police officer.
In the rare occasions where a company does manage to avoid government scrutiny, it takes years for them to lose market share. That's how slow and inefficient consumer backlash can be. It's not like consumers get to watch restaurant workers through a glass window and confirm that they're maintaining a clean environment.
Before the establishment of regulatory bodies like the FDA, food production was a hideously dangerous affair. Upton Sinclair's book The Jungle exposed grossly unsanitary practices at meatpacking plants, in which workers would constantly find rat feces dropped on meat and simply wipe it off with a glove rather than actually cleaning the meat or exterminating the rats.
The U.S. for one has already seen what unregulated food is like, both in our own history and in foreign countries in the present day. Companies don't spend time and money keeping their products safe because the market forces them to; they comply with inspections because the government forces them to.
Government owns roads, thus they are free to use for everyone, unless the government puts a toll on the road then there is a cost associated with the road that is passed down to the user.
This example, you are suggesting that the government takes control of the platform and allow free speech to flourish there. Sorry to say, I trust Zuckerberg more than I do any government to control it - and that is saying ALOT. And if a government gets their hands on a platform that has 2 billion users, expect there to be a toll placed on it ASAP so they can 1) generate revenue, 2) control the flow of information being supplied.
Also, I can't do whatever I want on a road. Here in Ottawa, I can't even start a street hockey game. I definitely can't run around naked on it (like I can on my private - out of public view - land) or do anything that may put another person in harms way on it. So if a company thinks one of their users may start causing harm or promote harm against another individual who also uses that platform, then yes, that company has every right to put a stop to it.
I think Internet companies learnt their lesson from the downfall of Yahoo! where mass advertisers pulled ads from all of their sites after it was reported that their ads were being displayed on user created content like chatrooms that were pedophilic in nature. Yahoo didn't control (or even attempt to control) what their user base was creating (and even if it was just a small handful of users), put children at danger in the process, and faced enough backlash from it that literally usurped them from their Internet throne.
Free speech can happen anywhere. If ideas are strong enough, they will flourish regardless of the platform that is being presented. These ideas do not even have to be right, or morally bound. Just look at the Q movement that started obscurely on one of the Chans and flourished.
But no site should be compelled to carry that message or any message just because of their reach. If a persons message isn't being heard on a site, they will just go elsewhere.
I don’t get it. Is he not allowed to seek employment?
Or are you assuming he was hired because of his past role in the Trump administration and not his military background that a lot of other board members have?
So you think Kelly directly had influence on the administrations position when it came these policies that were set? Is there proof to this, or is there just perception?
If he left the administration to take this job, id’d be throwing flags, but that wasn’t the case.
Edit: Because wealthy Democrats give all of their money to the poor, never try to make more money than they need, and are just all-around great human beings. Or, maybe it's just that the press isn't digging into every aspect of their lives...
Oh wow, speculative whataboutism. Innovative!
Huh, you’d think there’d be laws in place if that was the case wouldn’t you? There is in Canada http://ciec-ccie.parl.gc.ca/EN/Pages/ConflictOfInterestAct.aspx
So everyone on the board is there because the company was saying thank you? Or just him, because it is the easiest thing to assume. I see the military connection more than I see a Trump administration connection. What makes ex military leaders the right choice for the their board? I have no clue, but the company must have a reasoning behind it.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43jxgq/emails-show-trump-administration-lied-about-its-ability-to-reunite-families-separated-at-the-border
Lies on top of lies on top of lies, with a side a malicious cruelty, then more lies, and some more lies on top of that. They lie to Congress, they lie to the Courts, they can't even BOTHER to actually implement their policy with basic bookkeeping. The plan here seems to have been to separate the children from their families and then just say "fuck it, mission accomplished" and scatter all the information to the wind, with kids being flown to every corner of the country to detention center like the one John Kelly is now using to haul home a bed full of cash, while their parents are deported or unable to contact them for (as the article states) up to TWO YEARS!!!! But I'm sure any conservative parent reading this would be perfectly fine if they got arrested for jay-walking in 2018, had their kid shipped off to some camp in Texas, and didn't see them again until 2020. No harm, no foul. And they'd also be absolutely thrilled that the White House Chief of Staff who oversaw this policy was PROFITING off the fact that your kid was in government custody. This country has turned into a moral cesspool, and I'm not half as mad at the people who implement it as I am at the voters who excuse it day after day.
The corruption, incompetence and malfeasance are just off the charts. You can't keep up even if you immerse yourself in it day after day. And if you DO immerse yourself in it day after day, the reaction of some people will be to become completely numb to it, and for most of the others, it will instill nothing but a sense of resigned dread that nothing is going to stop it, discouraging them from even attempting to keep fighting it. Which is precisely the point and how ALL authoritarian takeovers take shape. And it just continues to unravel, and one day in the near future, alot of people are going to wake up and say "Jesus, what the hell happened, how did we get HERE??" And the answer will have been screaming at them the entire time.
No, he was on a different board, for a different company that now owns Caliburn. If it was an issue, why wasn't it addressed when DC Capital Partners bought Caliburn? Shouldn't that be the corruption issue being looked at. Did Kelly tip off his old employer about what the government was about to do?
Maybe it has to do with both the government and companies that deal with the government has been doing this for ever, case in point Halliburton.
And I have never agreed with the policies of separating children or how it was handled, or who is in charge of it and if the American people also don't agree with it, it should be an issue at the next election as well as the alleged, or potential corruption that may come from government workers being hired by companies that take government contracts.
Speculative? I remember a blind-eye being turned on Slick Willy back in the day. That was the start of my eyes being opened to how biased the press is. Remember Dan Quayle being ridiculed as being 'stupid'? I do. Remember Bush Sr. being ridiculed as 'out if touch'? I do. Remember Bob Dole being ridiculed as 'mean spirited'? I do. It was all fun and games back before Fox News. Now there's an alternative. Too bad they're just as biased in the other direction to the point that I find it unwatchable. People like the rest of my family watch it religiously though. Seems to me like the news media's power and credibility dropped as soon as their monolithic viewpoints were challenged.
I can't stand this asshole we have as president but I'm afraid that all of this grandstanding and hysteria on the left is going to backfire and we're going to get another 4 years of this crap. No, I'm not the 3-eyed Raven but im starting to get a bad feeling in my gut. That and the economy is doing pretty well. Lost in all of this is the fact that Trump's economic policies might actually be working...
1) I'm very skeptical that it's true. I think the Trump administration stands apart, at least since Nixon, in its level of corruption. And as you suggest, there's a substantial right-wing media apparatus these days that's more than happy to investigate Democrats.
2) If it is true, I hope those Democrats go to prison.
3) Either way, it should not be a basis for tolerating the corruption we already know about.
This is it.
No matter what, you can't excuse your team because "maybe those other guys are corrupt!" That's just a signal to your team to cheat and rob you.
check this out..
Tucker Carlson, who inherited a vast fortune from the Swanson frozen foods family fortune before being paid 10s of millions of dollars per year at Fox News, pretends to be a man of the people.
Why? Why talk about "racist trees" when your team is about to rob the working class and pass tax cuts for the rich?
Why an “out-of-the-closet elitist” rails against the “ruling class.”
If it's grandstanding to think that the President declaring himself totally above the law (and having his Attorney General agree with him), then we're screwed anyway. The official position of the Administration, and Republicans in general, is that if a President feels an investigation into him is unfair, he can simply end it because it is within his power to do so. This feeling would likely apply to roughly 99% of people who have ever been investigated or accused of a crime. They are refusing to even entertain the idea of answering Congressional subpoenas, as if the very nature of the House of Representatives itself is some kind of cute little side-game rather than a co-equal branch of government. ALL THREE of his Attorneys General have lied to Congress, and we have concrete proof based on the letter that came out on Thursday that Bill Barr just flat-out perjured himself when he said Mueller did not have any issues with his summary. The Attorney General, the highest law enforcement officer in the land, brazenly lying to Congress to protect one man. Meanwhile, we have bribes and favors exchanging hands at every Trump property the world over. Hysteria?? If this isn't worth getting upset or concerned about, what is?? What's the point where we should be up in arms?? What's the bar at this point, that anything short of murder is just business as usual??
Fast forward to today. What do you imagine FOX News does. They could just present clips of the interview as usual, maybe call her a sore loser of something along those lines. But no. Do you know what they do instead?? They PURPOSEFULLY leave out every single bit of the obvious context of the conversation, focus only on the "China, if you're listening, get Trump's tax returns" and then frame the story as if she is actually asking China to do this, rather than presenting a hypothetical. And now every person who watched this segment on FOX today believes that is what happened. Now, throw aside the monumental hypocrisy of someone who is able to be upset about her saying something like this and not Trump for the moment. Everyone involved in these segments on FOX knew FULL WELL that what Hillary was saying was a what if, tables were turned hypothetical scenario. No one with a single functioning brain cell could think otherwise. And they deliberately cut up the clip to make it seem like she was actually calling for China to hack Trump's tax returns.
This is not getting a story wrong, or being burned by a source. It is making a conscious decision to purposefully lie to millions of people ON PURPOSE to get them to believe something that isn't only not true, but is practically the opposite of true. In the same clip they altered, Hillary goes on to say how absurd it would be if anyone did say such a thing as she was presenting as a example. And you have millions of FOX viewers who now take it as gospel truth that Hillary asked China to hack Trump's tax returns. And this, ladies and gentleman, is why 33% of the country is basically brainwashed. Because they are being deliberately manipulated and lied to in the most cynical way imaginable. And the thing is, I could have predicted they would do this the moment I watched her interview last night.
And to be perfectly honest, after nearly 15 years of watching and hearing this stuff, I am at a total loss as to how to combat it. If you have absolutely no shame, it is not only easy to engage in this kind of misinformation, but the fact is, it works. It works better than people can possibly imagine. I rolled over to the FOX News comment section about the story a few minutes ago, and the general consensus is that (I shit you not) Hillary was serious last night, but that Trump was the one who was joking during the campaign in 2016. I mean, at a certain point, it's hard to not just want to throw in the towel. No amount of outreach is going to penetrate this. You'd have had an easier time deprogramming the people at Jonestown or Heaven's Gate.
Then there is a problem. What if big industries capture the regulators to require that everyone uses an very long process that is insanely expensive for small business? A lot of people has problems with monopolies, but ALL monopolies that exist on the human history was created by the state. Direct like East India Company or indirect, like insane amount of regulations
An interesting article https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly
China has much more regulations than USA. The main difference? When you have so many regulations, enforce then means that all economy breaks and the economy ""develops"" an disrespect by the rules and corruptions to survive and it leads to juridic instability. China, Brazil, Russia, all ultra centralized countries suffer for this problems. On USA, thanks to the regulations, the industry will become an oligopoly soon.
Don't buy meat without an private trusty institution saying that they care about hygiene and safety of their costumers.
It is not that the government has so many regulations that it can't enforce them all. The Chinese government is immensely powerful and can dictate all sorts of different rules if it wants to. It's perfectly capable of locking up ethnic minorities in concentration camps, violently assaulting scholars who disagree with Party policy, and forcing students to worship at the digital altar of their dictator for life Xi Jinping. The Chinese government is perfectly capable of making sure Chinese food is just as safe as American food.
The problem is that government officials choose not to enforce safety regulations because they get in the way of corporate profits. And as strange as it might sound, there's nothing the Chinese Community Party values more than corporate profits.
Speaking of China, today is the 100th anniversary of the May Fourth movement, anti-imperialist and pro-democracy protests in response to the drafting of the Treaty of Versailles. It's a key part of China's shift away from Yuan Shikai's dynasty and China's subservience to foreign powers, and a vital moment in their history.
In exactly one month, it will be the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests and the brutal Chinese Communist Party crackdown that left thousands of unarmed protestors dead.
But this isn't an example of misinterpreting Clinton's words, and this isn't an example of partisan spin. This is just full-blown lying. There is no excuse for this, no defense for this, and no alternative interpretation for this. You simply can't get things that backwards by accident. There is no way they didn't know exactly what they were doing.
@SorcererV1ct0r I agree it's an interesting article and I have quite a lot of sympathy with it. I would though note it was written in 1996 and since then we've seen the emergence of the new tech firms. No doubt the authors would refer to these as just illustrating the dynamic competitive process - even if certain firms are approaching a monopoly position now, they are only able to maintain that position if they can provide better service and prices to customers than potential competitors. That though assumes that price and service are the only issues - we've seen significant question marks about the wider effects on society of having such dominant players in the new tech industries.
The article also doesn't refer at all to the idea of universal service, which was one of the main reasons for establishing public monopolies. The market will only provide a service if customers can afford to pay for it, which leads to a big disparity between rural and urban areas over things like utilities provision. A good example is the working of the Post Office in the UK. For a long time that had a monopoly over postal services and prices were universal and low, while service quality was generally high. In recent years the service in a number of areas has been opened up to competition. That's allowed significant drops in cost for some consumers - such as large firms making extensive use of parcel deliveries. However, without the ability to cross-subsidize, the Post Office (now Royal Mail) has had to increase the cost of the universal service and reduce service quality. They are also now agitating for a total end to the universal service obligation placed on them - saying, rightly, that it makes a nonsense of the idea of fair competition.
The example of post is not the only area where there's been a trend away from the idea of a level playing field for everyone. One interesting point though is that the availability of internet provision is an area where there's currently a trend towards that - the UK government has invested heavily in subsidizing the extension of the services funded by the market, in order to improve access to the internet in more rural areas.
Grond0, you are right, but IMO people who live in areas where is more expensive to deliver postals should pay more for it. Look to internet. Someone who lives in a montain on North part of Alaska will pay more for internet and get worse internet than soemone living in NY. There are advantages of living in rural areas, like less criminalty, but i don't like the idea of socialize the costs.
When i visited Argentina, i visited "Colonia Suiza" too and honestly, the internet there was not that bad. Only used to share photos on whatsapp, but was better than on the bigger city hotel. Small cities can get good internet. You can see on map that the city is very small, an very small city that is low populated managed to have usable internet. Something that big cities on Brazil has problems with "data caps" due the excessive regulation creating an "cartel"
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Colonia+Suiza,+Río+Negro,+Argentina/@-41.095334,-71.5120054,17z/data=!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x961a7b1520c860e5:0x8210ae97cb7b9a65!2sSan+Carlos+de+Bariloche,+Río+Negro,+Argentina!3b1!8m2!3d-41.1334722!4d-71.3102778!3m4!1s0x961a744474761a51:0x6659bcdb699c6c9b!8m2!3d-41.0952652!4d-71.5105247
It gets worse, however, and goes to how after such tactics take place, FOX has then set the terms of the debate for the so-called centrist mainstream media. I just saw a headline I had missed about it from Politico, where it says she "seemingly" made a tongue-in-cheek comment about it. No Politico, there was no "seemingly" about it. That is what happened. But because they are so mortally afraid of being seen as biased by right-wing media, the centrist Beltway press will go out of their way to paint ANY situation as having two equally valid points of view. So now we have this story, even in non-FOX or AM radio outlets, being framed as "on the one hand, Secretary Clinton was making a point" and "on the other hand, she may have been secretly signalling to China to hack Trump" when only one of these is anywhere close to being reality. Rinse and repeat on nearly every story.
Moreover, I just watched the same clip on some Youtube channels, and the narrative has completely taken hold. And the lack of irony detection and willful obtuseness of so many of the comments leads me to belive we are in big trouble as a country. Because I've sampled the comment sections of multiple places on this topic last night and today, and I'm now convinced that people don't even need FOX News to purposefully cut the clip short, because they are more than capable on their own of watching the entire thing and completely missing the point simply because they want to. There are at least FIVE major tells as to the context of what she is talking about in the full clip. One is the entire 6 or 7 minutes of what was being talked about beforehand. The 2nd is that she literally uses the word "hypothetical". The 3rd is that she in that hypothetical talks about a 2020 candidate, and she isn't part of that field. The 4th is the tone of her voice. And the 5th is that she ends the entire thing by saying "the fact we are even talking about this shows how absurd the situation we find ourselves in is". It's one thing to lack context when shown a clip on FOX News. It's another to be presented the context and pretend it isn't there.
So Trump's willing to talk to Putin about Mueller but was not willing to talk to Mueller about Putin.
And in that call did the so called President tell Putin that the Mueller Report contained information about Russia’s interference with our democracy?
Did Trump tell Putin that he’d not tolerate Russian election interference in the future? Did the President do this job or did he provide comfort and kiss the ass of our enemy?
Did the president give Putin the green light to do it again?
There is a small part of me (a very small part) that honestly wants a Democrat to get into office and start trying all this shit just so we can see HOW QUICKLY the opinions of millions of people would flip on a goddamn dime. Imagine if Obama had been found to have received the help of (through election interference), oh I don't know, Iran in the 2008 election. And then he has phone conversations with the Ayatollah and refuses to commit to protecting the elections in 2012. I'm sure that would have worked out just wonderfully for him.