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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#177526: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:14:11 AM

[up] Supposedly it was because Donald Roy Cohn made the dying Fred Trump Sr. sign a new will that left Donald with everything while the latter was in the last throes of dementia.

Oh and before all of that and on top of the "loan", Fred Trump Sr. kept bailing out Donald after all of his many financial screw-ups.

edited 10th Mar '17 7:15:14 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#177527: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:14:40 AM

It's important to remember that Trump and the current Congress have yet to do much of anything economically. Trump's pushed out a bunch of executive orders of dubious meaning and legality, but Congress hasn't passed a new budget or repealed Obamacare or done much of anything else it's been champing at the bit over. The economic impacts won't be felt for a while even if they get around to doing something.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#177528: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:15:35 AM

A bunch of businesses in Vermont are worried that Canadians being turned away at the border/writing the US off until 2020/2024 could be a fatal blow to their income.

But Vermonters live in a Blue state, so its not like they are people or anything.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/canada-us-border-vermont-passport-businesses-1.4017676

[up]But try explaining that to idiotic swing voters (but I repeat myself) in the face of headlines like this.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/10/news/economy/february-jobs-report/index.html

edited 10th Mar '17 7:27:31 AM by Rationalinsanity

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#177529: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:16:32 AM

[up][up] I for one am not looking forward to the impact once they start implementing actual economic policy. I don't want to go through another Great Recession. Or worse, a Great Depression.

edited 10th Mar '17 7:16:40 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#177530: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:21:27 AM

The question is whether they can implement economic policy. As Krugman points out, one of the key reasons why the Republican Obamacare "replacement" proposal is so bad is that the people who wrote it are shamefully ignorant of the subject matter. But the reason for that is that there's no room for competent policymakers in the modern GOP. They aren't trustworthy, because they might tell the Emperor that he's naked and that would disrupt the ideological circle-jerk.

So, instead, the people who try to implement the ideology with actual legislation are selected precisely for their lack of competence, with the obvious result that the legislation they propose cannot possibly work, and will likely not pass even a Republican-controlled Congress. Indeed, the 2017-2018 session of Congress may well go down in the history as the least productive ever, and it's something we should be thankful for if it happens.

edited 10th Mar '17 7:22:25 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#177531: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:23:35 AM

[up] The inevitable consequence of favoring ideology and Party loyalty over actual competence for decades.

edited 10th Mar '17 7:24:00 AM by M84

Disgusted, but not surprised
CenturyEye Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign? from I don't know where the Yith sent me this time... Since: Jan, 2017 Relationship Status: Having tea with Cthulhu
Tell Me, Have You Seen the Yellow Sign?
#177532: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:35:38 AM

[up]x4 Judging by the comments. I don't think their "Vermont is not Trumpland" angle will work. Many are just about how border dwellers no longer feel welcome crossing, so why take the hassle and others about principles, but occasionally you get... note 

Well too bad. We love you too. But your choice of leader has now made it impossible for us to visit

Hopefully you will grow up in the coming 3 years and 6 months and realize that actions have consequences, that our friendship is not to be taken for granted and that all people deserve respect and dignity.

But you have a long way to go. You have elected a disaster waiting to happen, you have acted on fear and loathing and now you are a house divided. And a house divided against itself cannot stand

We wish you the best of luck.


I remember something about Trump making the US respectable again, but at least the Trump slump means they won't be seeing too many more of those vile foreigners...

Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#177533: Mar 10th 2017 at 7:38:23 AM

[up] The notion of Trump making the USA respectable (let alone great) is a sick joke, considering Trump himself is not worthy of respect.

Disgusted, but not surprised
pwiegle Cape Malleum Majorem from Nowhere Special Since: Sep, 2015 Relationship Status: Singularity
Cape Malleum Majorem
#177534: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:08:37 AM

[up]You have to give it to get it. It's a very simple rule, that sadly some people never learn. And at 70, Trump is far too old and too set in his ways to change his life-long habits.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
DingoWalley1 Asgore Adopts Noelle Since: Feb, 2014 Relationship Status: Can't buy me love
IFwanderer use political terms to describe, not insult from Earth Since: Aug, 2013 Relationship Status: Wishfully thinking
use political terms to describe, not insult
#177536: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:22:40 AM

New York Times: The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache

Short version: The entire "CIA is hacking your TV" thing was just commonly known hacking techniques mixed with wikileaks smoke and mirrors. And I bolded a specific paragraph of the article that I think we should pay special attention to:

    Article 
On Tuesday morning, Wiki Leaks released an enormous cache of documents that it claimed detailed “C.I.A. hacking tools.” Immediately afterward, it posted two startling tweets asserting that “C.I.A. hacker malware” posed a threat to journalists and others who require secure communication by infecting iPhone and Android devices and “bypassing” encrypted message apps such as Signal and Whats App.

This appeared to be a bombshell. Signal is considered the gold standard for secure communication. Whats App has a billion users. The C.I.A., it seemed, had the capacity to conduct sweeping surveillance on what we had previously assumed were our safest and most private digital conversations.

In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the leading news organizations took the Wiki Leaks tweets at face value. Their initial accounts mentioned Signal, Whats App and other encrypted apps by name, and described them as “bypassed” or otherwise compromised by the C.I.A.’s cyberspying tools.

Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither Signal nor Whats App, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged C.I.A. files in the cache. (Using automated tools to search the whole database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.) More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps — at least not in the sense of “bypass” that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of encryption technologies.

What had gone wrong? There were two culprits: an honest (if careless) misunderstanding about technology on the part of the press; and yet another shrewd misinformation campaign orchestrated by Wiki Leaks.

Let’s start with the technology. In the aftermath of Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about potential mass surveillance, there has been a sharp increase in the use of these “end to end” encryption apps, which render even the company that owns the app or phone essentially unable to read or hear the communications between the two “end” users.

Given that entities like Signal and Whats App cannot get access to the content of these conversations, even in response to a warrant — Whats App keeps logs of who talked to whom, Signal doesn’t do even that — intelligence agencies have been looking to develop techniques for hacking into individual phones. That way, they could see the encrypted communications just as individual users of the apps would.

These techniques are what the leaked cache revealed. Security experts I spoke with, however, stressed that these techniques appear to be mostly known methods — some of them learned from academic and other open conferences — and that there were no big surprises or unexpected wizardry.

In other words, the cache reminds us that if your phone is hacked, the Signal or Whats App messages on it are not secure. This should not come as a surprise. If an intelligence agency, or a nosy sibling, can get you to install, say, a “key logger” on your phone, either one can bypass the encrypted communication app. But so can someone looking over your shoulder while you use your phone. That is about the vulnerability of your device. It has nothing to do with the security of the apps.

If anything in the Wiki Leaks revelations is a bombshell, it is just how strong these encrypted apps appear to be. Since it doesn’t have a means of easy mass surveillance of such apps, the C.I.A. seems to have had to turn its attention to the harder and often high-risk task of breaking into individual devices one by one.

Which brings us to Wiki Leaks’ misinformation campaign. An accurate tweet accompanying the cache would have said something like, “If the C.I.A. goes after your specific phone and hacks it, the agency can look at its content.” But that, of course, wouldn’t have caused alarm and defeatism about the prospects of secure conversations.

We’ve seen Wiki Leaks do this before. Last July, right after the attempted coup in Turkey, Wiki Leaks promised, with much fanfare, to release emails belonging to Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party. What Wiki Leaks ultimately released, however, was nothing but mundane mailing lists of tens of thousands of ordinary people who discussed politics online. Back then, too, the ruse worked: Many Western journalists had hyped these non-leaks.

Wiki Leaks seems to have a playbook for its disinformation campaigns. The first step is to dump many documents at once — rather than allowing journalists to scrutinize them and absorb their significance before publication. The second step is to sensationalize the material with misleading news releases and tweets. The third step is to sit back and watch as the news media unwittingly promotes the Wiki Leaks agenda under the auspices of independent reporting.

The media, to its credit, eventually sorts things out — as it has belatedly started to do with the supposed C.I.A. cache. But by then, the initial burst of misinformation has spread. On social media in particular, the spin and distortion continues unabated. This time around, for example, there are widespread claims on social media that these leaked documents show that it was the C.I.A. that hacked the Democratic National Committee, and that it framed Russia for the hack. (The documents in the cache reveal nothing of the sort.)

As with most misinformation campaigns, the dust that is kicked up obscures concerns over a real issue. Device and information insecurity, overzealous surveillance by governments — these are real concerns that call for real attention. Yes, we need to have extensive and thoughtful discussion of these topics. But that’s not what the Wiki Leaks misinformation campaign has given us.

Edit: [up] huh... good on him I guess.

edited 10th Mar '17 8:24:00 AM by IFwanderer

1 2 We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. -KV
speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#177537: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:26:07 AM

Even if there was some job growth in February, it's probably not going to last in the long run. Tourism is way down and is unlikely to improve anytime soon, due to Trump's aggressive anti-immigration policies and the deplorables making our entire country look hostile and uninviting. The strong-arm "MERICA FIRST!" tactics that Trump uses mean other countries aren't going to want to work with us, which will diminish trade. And that's not even getting into the economic problems if the health care bill somehow passes.

edited 10th Mar '17 8:32:55 AM by speedyboris

Rationalinsanity from Halifax, Canada Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
#177538: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:26:14 AM

He doesn't deserve praise for following the most basic rules regarding conflict of interest.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#177539: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:36:15 AM

Given that Tillerson's role at State seems mainly to be one of keeping a seat warm while the department withers away into irrelevance, his recusal or lack thereof seems to be startlingly irrelevant.

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#177540: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:43:38 AM

Current headline on CNN: Trump called previous job reports "phony", "a joke"

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#177541: Mar 10th 2017 at 8:46:35 AM

I'm sure he'll take credit for this report, of course, despite it being logically impossible for him to have done anything to influence it.

Maddowblog: Republicans are particularly concerned about getting rid of the Obamacare rule requiring that women's insurance plans cover prenatal care without additional cost. They claim that this forces men to "pay for care they will never use". The startling idiocy of this argument aside (every man was born from a woman who needed prenatal care, and prenatal coverage also benefits men who have families), it appears to have economic roots as well, as the coverage mandate was in effect a significant wealth transfer from men to women. We've seen that Republicans will leap at any opportunity to prevent women from getting an equal share in the economy.

edited 10th Mar '17 9:48:56 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
pwiegle Cape Malleum Majorem from Nowhere Special Since: Sep, 2015 Relationship Status: Singularity
Cape Malleum Majorem
#177542: Mar 10th 2017 at 9:16:13 AM

[up]The typical Republican must believe that the stork delivers babies, and that his grandmother is still a virgin. So of course this silly pre-natal care thing is something only a Democrat could dream up.

This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
speedyboris Since: Feb, 2010
#177543: Mar 10th 2017 at 9:41:01 AM

[up]x3 Projection. tongue

edited 10th Mar '17 9:45:31 AM by speedyboris

TobiasDrake (•̀⤙•́) (Edited uphill both ways) Relationship Status: Arm chopping is not a love language!
(•̀⤙•́)
#177544: Mar 10th 2017 at 9:52:09 AM

Current headline on CNN: Trump called previous job reports "phony", because he is a joke.

Fixed that for you.

My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#177545: Mar 10th 2017 at 10:38:56 AM

[up] says more about CNN than anything.

DingoWalley1 Asgore Adopts Noelle Since: Feb, 2014 Relationship Status: Can't buy me love
Asgore Adopts Noelle
#177546: Mar 10th 2017 at 10:40:13 AM

House Committee approves of Bill that would allow Employers to test the genetics of their Employees for 'Workplace Wellness Programs'. This is seriously out of control. I'm worried that Ryancare is literally only out in the House to allow for these worse programs to pass with little to no fanfare.

CrimsonZephyr Would that it were so simple. from Massachusetts Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: It's complicated
Would that it were so simple.
#177547: Mar 10th 2017 at 10:47:28 AM

The Democrats will have to put out a lot of fires in 2020 if they ever come back to power.

"For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."
fruitpork Since: Oct, 2010
sgamer82 Since: Jan, 2001
#177549: Mar 10th 2017 at 10:53:34 AM

https://whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com/2017/03/10/Day-50/

The more I read about the American Health Care Act, the more I'm convinced that repealing the Affordable Care Act is more trouble than it's worth and it's pretty much just the GOP stroking their "OBAMA BAD!" hard on than actually doing anything useful.

TacticalFox88 from USA Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Dating the Doctor
#177550: Mar 10th 2017 at 10:58:23 AM

This country really DID lose its fucking mind when we dared elect a Black dude as the world's most powerful man.

New Survey coming this weekend!

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