He's a terrible candidate. Leftists hate him due to stuff like stop&frisk, his history with women, and the mere fact that he's a billionaire. Conservatives hate him due to stuff like confiscatory gun control, fixation on climate change, pro-choice policies, and weak-borders policies. He was super supportive of the Iraq war. The defining characteristic of Bloomberg's politics is that he's an authoritarian: he wants government to control every aspect of everyone's life. He's probably an even worse candidate than Hillary Clinton, both from a "good for the world" perspective and a political perspective.
Normally I'd write him off completely, but he does have an insane amount of money. He makes Trump look middle class. If he wins the primary or especially the presidency, it'll be 100% because of his money.
His campaign is totally unprecedented because of how late he's entered the race and because nobody's ever tried to run a campaign fueled by nothing but massive piles of cash like this before. (In 2016, Trump was significantly outfunded by Clinton.) So it's difficult to predict. But I tend to think that it'll fail completely, and he'll win zero delegates.
+1 on all of this Theymos. We're usually pretty close on political opinions. I don't know if anyone saw -- but Bloomberg put out an update saying that he wouldn't be using his vast media empire to dig into secrets on the people that he's going up against in the dem primary. I think the official statement was that Bloomberg reporters wouldn't be looking at Michael Bloomberg (as per usual) and his opponents in the dem primary. Though Trump wasn't mentioned here, so yeah. Even if he doesn't win, he's going to ensure that the 'right' dem does so his interests are protected. |
|
|
|
Trump, because he will appoint more conservative constitutional supreme court judges as opposed anyone on the left will appoint liberal activist judges who they hope can erode our freedom..
Whoever is for the smallest government possible and most constitution..
At the end of the day -- when Government wants to make themselves bigger and bring more control to themselves -- both parties agree with eachother in want they want to do. If you were to look at something like the Patriot Act -- in theory you would think that Conservatives would shoot that one down because of the fact that it literally invades on the personal liberties of people and invades on your right to be protected from search and seziure AND invades on your right to privacy. But no : There's an unwritten rule to allow government to get bigger and bigger and get more and more involved in peoples lives. |
|
|
|
|
I'm guessing this comes from lobbying from the --domain lobby -- to be able to rise the price of domain prices and bring in more revenue for everyone. Because I think that all of these companies are dealing with percentages and all stand to make a little bit more if they're able to raise prices on domains.
Though the only good thing in the world of competition and TONS AND TONS OF COMPANIES selling domains is the fact that companies are going to make it as cheap as possible to buy a domain due to competition from others in keeping and retaining customers. Capitalism, eh?
|
|
|
|
|
I think the craziest thing about this presidency is the fact that Trump is the biggest news story every single day. There's not one day that you will go online and see that someone else as the top headline.
This wasn't the case for Obama or Bush or anyone before him.
Everyday people wait for what Trump does, or tweets, or says and then they start making their news stories for the day. I think that's INSANE.
|
|
|
|
|
Hm.
This is truly a tough one to look at because I think that my analysis would've been much different if Bloomberg had declared when the other candidates had declared for the Presidential. In todays day and age this is a VERY late announcement and is going to hurt because a good deal of people have already picked their candidate or are happy with the current pool of candidates.
I've seen polls in the recent weeks saying that most people -- around 50-70 percent of potential dem primary voters are saying that they dont support the new candidates and their entries (Bloomberg, Deval Patrick, etc)
But if we're straight up comparing if Bloomberg was the Dem nominee of the party, there's no doubt that Bloomberg would be able to beat Trump on paper. Bloomberg is on a different caliber of Billionaire compared to Trump -- I think Bloomberg is in the realm of $40B or so compared to Trumps reported $3b-5 and Bloomberg isn't just someone with money, he's someone that owns a fucking news company that is a major force in the world of news.
But at the end of the day, Trump is a curve ball so you'd never be able to know if he could pull it off against Bloomberg. As Bloomberg is someone who is typically only known as a rich guy from New York who supports gun control / climate change politicians across the country. That's really it.
|
|
|
|
Lets be real for a second. Both parties get money from people who benefit from Marijuana being illegal. I'll even go through a list of people relating to this.....
You left out Lawyers, who have the single largest cash grab from marijuana being illegal, and who are > 90% Democrat. Did leave out lawyers, and I apoligize for that. Though that stat most likely isn't true. From the information which I sourced from http://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/ - it seems like certain portions of law are more democrat and other portions are more republican, though the split seems to be in the realm of 70-30 Democrat. |
|
|
|
Mandatory disclaimer: BADecker is not a lawyer and his posts are not legal advice. He is a troll and/or idiot and if you follow his idiotic advice you probably deserve whatever happens to you. That is all.Agree with this. All of this is wrong BADECKER is spreading false information which is obvious bullshit. This is more the reason why I think all the trolls should go to their own bullshit section -- or we all go to the serious P&S section..... |
|
|
|
No it's not something that is used in the game itself, it's for your own personal use. Me and some friends were screwing around with it with all the lights off, and it was INSANE how it worked.
It's not like an addon to wear during the game, it's something that you use personally. Look it up as well. If you are talking about a physical device, it is probably just a IR illuminator, they are dirt cheap and sold as kids toys. Eh I mean, not a kids toy. Actually a tad on the expensive side (in my mind, probably not in the world of night vision goggles). $200 for the game, some other collectors stuff, and for this. I guess that would peg the price for this thing around $120ish?  ? Does that count as a shitty kids toy (Not being a dick, just don't know the going rate for things like this) "professional" IR illuminators start around the $100 range so the price you are targeting is about right, but the fact is it is just a big boy toy. IR illuminators are fun, but they aren't "night vision" as most people understand it and have some serious limitations. They have their uses, but at the end of the day it is still just a digital camera with some IR LEDs in a cool looking headset made to look like actual military night vision. Makes sense. When we were all messing around with it we were saying that it was just a straight image -- had no depth perception or anything like that. Which I guess is to be expected out of something which is just illuminating and is $120. Big boy toy...... I can only imagine what the government / cia is using. |
|
|
|
|
Lets be real for a second. Both parties get money from people who benefit from Marijuana being illegal. I'll even go through a list of people relating to this.
Sherrifs Unions and Police Unions support both sides.
Private Prisons go typically Republican.
Correctional Unions support both sides.
Big Pharma supports both sides.
Democrats in the house are able to vote this one up because they know it has no consequences. They know they can still raise money for their elections either way, because their decisions aren't going to go any further then this vote.
Do I think that Marijuana should be legal on a federal level? Yes. Though I think the best course of action is to allow for the federal government to have no stance, and leave it up to the states on if they want to keep it legal. I think that's the best way to make people involved on the state level (and the level that is closest to them)
|
|
|
|
The Fed is still independent of the President and of congress,
Congress can abolish the federal reserve if they want. They hold the utmost power in the USA. Don't underestimate the power of congress. But why? What would be the reasoning behind eliminating the Fed? What have they done to deserve such sanction? Do I think the Fed should do a better job of explaining the monetary policy that they enact? Yes. They do a horrible job doing so, and because of that the people think they have ulterior motives when they do things. But I think if they were to explain things to the American people, that would HELP a ton. |
|
|
|
Bullshit.
> On November 2, 2017, President Donald Trump nominated Powell to serve as the Chair of the Federal Reserve. Ahaha, appoints the guy. Totally not Trump's fault. /s Man, how can you appoint someone and then blame them. Must be a shit at picking people. Then again, it's pretty obvious Trump's an idiot. Auditing the fed is something the right wing has wanted for decades. Need to reconcile all the money. I mean there's isn't much someone could do when they're appointing a fed chair. The Fed is still independent of the President and of congress, which means that once they're nominated the President isn't able to fire you for not following 'their policies' as the policies of the Fed are supposed to be above politics and be long term and for the betterment of the nation. Trump hates Powell because Powell won't bend the knee and drop rates further so the economy has cheap loans to continue to boom. Pretty much Trump saying he wants some artificial growth for his campaign so he can say he did that and try to win again with a great economy. |
|
|
|
The Fed doesn't need to be audited. Trump is putting things in place that will reduce or destroy the Fed. Auditing will simply be a waste of time.  Fake news! Trump appointed failure of a federal reserve leadership. The crazy bit is after 2 years, people still support this asshat  Must be all that propaganda they consume. I don't even know what you're spewing here. Trump hates his current appointment to the Fed Reserve and has called for him to resign, has contacted his WH counsel to see if he can fire him, and so on and so forth. If you want to expand the scope of audits or to put the audits into the hands of private independent people then so be it. But the Fed is currently audited, and I've said that time and time again here. |
|
|
|
First, thanks for sharing this article. It has opened my eyes to why a lot of Chinese people are fleeing away from their country and reasons why they don't like it in China, in General. For the NY Times to cover this would help open eyes to many people. Anyways, I am surprised to see that there are still things like this happening in the world and this is probably why China has a lot of rules, including that they are a large country, to begin with, to consider stuff like - Internet Censorship [1]
- Monitoring every citizen [1]
- Closing discussion boards [2]
- Limiting religious sentiments [3]
There is really something deep going on with that and being told that "Everything is going to be okay" and "To Be Grateful" towards the detention of the family is absurd. It would be hard for the victims to have any say once they are branded "terrorists" in another country. They would just be detained and hope for the best, and that's just not good. I'm just hoping this doesn't happen to other places because this clearly shows how China wants to take control over everything and once you give resistance to them, they would execute the "Absolutely No Mercy" rule to you.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_China[2] - https://web.archive.org/web/20051029012334/http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2005/03/students_protes.php[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_ChinaThis is the thing I think we need to note. Which is horrible, and shouldn't be tolerated at all in then modern day. Even further, I think that the craziest part is that we swore to never allow another extermination of people to happen again, and to never tolerate the atrocities that were put upon the Jews, Disabled, Old People, Women (etc), to happen again in the modern world. But that's not what we let happen. We've let China FUCKING HARVEST THE ORGANS OF THEIR prisoners while these people are still alive. They're not feeding the people, they're dying of starvation. We should right now sanction China to end the atrocities that they're committing upon the Muslims and then upon the people in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong they're literally firing upon people with live ammunition to stop the protesters. They're SHOOTING at protesters. We should never stop in our attack on China for the horrible things that they're doing in the world. They won't stop unless we send a clear message with clear punishments for their actions. |
|
|
|
Every enterprise has dark sides. They need to do whatever to keep the price low. They are sourcing material from cheap provider, it's not much of their concern how the product is obtained. It's largely the responsibility of the Congo's government to stop child labor and make provision for these kid to obtain proper education in schools. And we should rather pressure/help congo's government to make the change. Pressuring Telsa to stop getting Cobalt from DRC would have even more drastic consequences for those kids.
While I typically do follow this line of thinking. They don't HAVE to do this, no one is forcing them to do such. It's just the fact that in order to keep shareholders and buyers of the car happy, they're going to need to save money on certain things -- and buying cobalt from a place which treats their workers horribly is something they're going to do. Profits are what business is all about. Since something like 2/3 of Cobalt produced comes from DR Congo, I wouldn't single out Tesla here, as many others are using Cobalt from the same source ( for example cobalt for batteries in our mobile phone most likely comes from Congo) and with many other companies announcing electric cars, demand will significantly rise in years to come. In a country that has one of the lowest GDP per capita in the world, world's 2nd rate of infant mortality, use of child soldiers in conflicts, decades of dictatorship and overall instability, child labor is something that is unfortunately very hard to eradicate. I just hope that DR Congo government will eventually start doing something in that regard I feel sorry for DR Congo, that area has been heavily exploited in past as well, and unfortunately history tends to repeat itself. Belgium King Leopold II owned that whole country, and used it as private property from 1885 to 1908, and during that period millions lost their lives during brutal exploitation. Here is the link if someone wants to read more about that somewhat forgotten part of the history. I think this line of thinking is the better one, if this is the only place you're going to be able to buy this then this is what's going to happen. |
|
|
|
Just to start out, going to say that you did put a good deal of work into making this. So I must say that I do appreciate that, and do reward that on this forum. Thanks. But I do want to talk about a couple things that you've written, and we can use it as a way to learn about some politics. Of course, more republican candidates are probably waiting to announce their candidacy.
No other Republican candidates are going to be running against Trump. He is the incumbent, and he is the President. Which pretty much means that he is the head of the party. Even going a bit further with that, Trump himself has shown to be someone who can build up and destroy Republicans within his own party -- you either bend the knee or he''ll ensure that you don't win your primary (Look at Matt Gaetz in Florida, who won in an upset because of Trumps endorsement) Even Bill Weld isn't a serious candidate in the eyes of the Republican voters. He's not going to win, so lets just end that right there. But talking about any of the other Dem candidates, I think even if you go through all of their platforms you're going to be unable (Minus YANG, but I don't consider him a Dem. He's just running on the ticket to have relevance) to find someone who likes Bitcoin and is willing to support it. The biggest thing about the office of the President and the executive is control. Most of the things that these candidates are calling for require a good deal of control by the executive, and the only way that is possible is if they control the money supply as well. Using Bitcoin ensures that they have no control of the money supply. I think the biggest thing we should remember about Bitcoin is STATES -- states are the ones that typically push forward regulations that effect Bitcoin. Ex: New York and their BitLicense. What evil, in this current government, do you see towards Bitcoin? Is there something in particular, legislative / regulatory wise, that you want to see changed? |
|
|
|
Trump will be disqualified by a simple majority in senate. Therefore, he won't be eligible to run for 2020. Therefore, he won't win a second term.
Even if you're convicted by the Senate you're still able to run for a third term -- as he wouldn't be term limited at that point, just removed from office. Not saying he would win or anything, but just pointing something out. This is only possible if the Senate doesn't hold a disqualification vote -- meaning that the Senate doesn't vote on if he's able to run for President again. This happened in the past to Alcee Hastings, a former federal judge from Florida who was impeached and convicted from his post by the Senate by accepting a $150,000 bribe in return for a lenient sentence for a particular individual. Due to the fact that the Senate hadn't held a disqualification vote from another Federal office, he had been able to run for the House and had won his election -- he's been serving since 1993 in the House. He's also the #1 Ranked in the House for Nepotism claims, see below quote from Wikipedia In 2012, Hastings was ranked #1 out of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives for paying salaries and fees to family members, according to the conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch.[30] A state-by-state report on members of Congress published by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington reported that Hastings paid his girlfriend, Patricia Williams, an attorney who worked as his deputy district director, $622,574 over the four-year period, from 2007 to 2010.[31] So yeah, fun little tidbit of knowledge. |
|
|
|
It's the sad truth of any new tech that has to use certain minerals. They're most likely coming from places with horrible working conditions, child labor, people are dying while mining these things, and so on and so forth. Though Tesla is trying to find a way to not have to rely on precious metals such as Cobalt -- see here ( https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/21/17488626/elon-musk-cobalt-electric-vehicle-battery-science) as I think he's the one thats single handidly draining the supply of Cobalt. So, that probably isn't too cheap. |
|
|
|
I think it is pretty clear that Vindman is the source to the person who filed the whistleblower complaint. He would not directly answer a question about if he knew if anyone who spoke to the press about the phone call. He also refused to answer questions about who he spoke to about the phone call, using a bogus claim that he didn’t have to answer.
The more the hearings go on, the more obvious it becomes that this is a partisan exercise. I would not be surprised if Democrats lose votes when they vote on articles of impeachment. I would put the chances of articles of impeachment failing to pass to be at least 40%.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that the guy Vindman told but wasn't allowed to name is the whistle blower. The identity of the whistle blower is irrelevant though. Even if Hillary Clinton were the whistle blower, it wouldn't change the fact that the report was deemed credible by the IG and that most of the claims have been corroborated by credible witnesses. Harping on exposing the whistle blowers identity is just a distraction. Hearing #2 of the day starts in a few minutes. I think the portion about the whistleblower is that the GOP wants to know if Trump had someone actively working against him in the White House -- which is most likely true, I mean there have been reports that his CoS and his Sec of State (former ones) had tried to recruit Nikki Haley to join them to stop Trump and save the country. So I wouldn't be surprised if he was actively working against the President. Their whole thing is if they can find out that the whistleblower hated Trump, they can spin this as a story of a disgruntled employee and try to shy away from the Ukraine stuff. Makes a little bit of sense. |
|
|
|
No it's not something that is used in the game itself, it's for your own personal use. Me and some friends were screwing around with it with all the lights off, and it was INSANE how it worked.
It's not like an addon to wear during the game, it's something that you use personally. Look it up as well. If you are talking about a physical device, it is probably just a IR illuminator, they are dirt cheap and sold as kids toys. Eh I mean, not a kids toy. Actually a tad on the expensive side (in my mind, probably not in the world of night vision goggles). $200 for the game, some other collectors stuff, and for this. I guess that would peg the price for this thing around $120ish? ? Does that count as a shitty kids toy (Not being a dick, just don't know the going rate for things like this) |
|
|
|
Wonder how expensive these fucking things are, and who would be able to obtain and use them for -- not so good purposes.
Imagine what the US military (and others have) around the world, if this is what our private researchers are allowed to tell us about?
A friend of mine just bought the night vision stuff with the last COD game, shit was pretty wild and that was a cheap device. Imagine what a couple hundred thousand dollars gets you.
That sounds quite useless given that, even if the game won't let you adjust settings, both the monitor and the OS controls would (ie. gamma slider). Of course the military and other security forces would be the most "volunteer" test subjects, lets hope it doesn't have any nasty side effects... The question is: gene modification to have that fish eye when? No it's not something that is used in the game itself, it's for your own personal use. Me and some friends were screwing around with it with all the lights off, and it was INSANE how it worked. It's not like an addon to wear during the game, it's something that you use personally. Look it up as well. |
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
