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ForumsDiscussion Forum → Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
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Inauguration Day, Inauguration Hooooooraaay!
2017-07-30, 9:08 AM #3361
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
We need to pull together enough bitcoins to buy Nikumubeki a Massassi Forest so he can get that loan.


I could trade for about 50, that should actually cover a small stand of trees.
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-07-31, 1:32 PM #3362
Lol Trump fired scaramucci

Gotta say, I'm slightly disappointed, he could have done a lot more damage to the WH had he stayed on longer. But this looks bad too, just 10 days and already playing musical chairs again....
2017-07-31, 2:42 PM #3363
Kelly might turn things around. But even though he is a general, I doubt even he has what it takes to stay above the fray and remain entirely on the president's good side. But maybe he can bring at least some small amount of discipline to the operation as a whole.

Scaramucci must've been truly awful to have been fired so quickly.
former entrepreneur
2017-07-31, 2:50 PM #3364
My feeling is that any single person who has any scrupples will eventually run afoul of an unpredictable liar like Trump, almost with mathematical predictability. I think that the exception to this is based on mutual respect of prowess between two primates that causes the pair to keep a mutual distance rather than starting another bar fight. Therefore, fact that Kelly is a high ranking military official is likely to cause Trump to keep enough distance from him to avoid an outright fight, but he may eventually dispose of him too for unrelated frustrations.
2017-07-31, 2:53 PM #3365
It seems possible for sure. There've been tensions between him and McMaster lately (so I hear), so being a decorated high ranking soldier doesn't make a person immune to pissing matches with the president.
former entrepreneur
2017-07-31, 2:55 PM #3366
Quote:
Scaramucci must've been truly awful to have been fired so quickly.


He was just another version of Trump, which is probably why Trump was close to him. But all Trump-like particles follow an exclusion principle. Trump, speaking to himself in front of the mirror: "Cant live with me, can't live without me".
2017-07-31, 3:04 PM #3367
Donald Trump has been said to represent the ultimate conclusion of what a conservative politician should be, according to the universe of Fox News. What's revealing is that the self-contradictory nature of this conservative caricature really does seem to manifest in clearly erratic and unpredictable behaviour when put into literal practice by Trump, rather than simply existing in some fantasy TV world.

For generations, we'll be able to point to Trump as the worst example of what a conservative can be, as intimated by Fox News. But I am sure their viewers will fail to connect the dots....
2017-07-31, 3:12 PM #3368
Originally posted by Eversor:
It seems possible for sure. There've been tensions between him and McMaster lately (so I hear), so being a decorated high ranking soldier doesn't make a person immune to pissing matches with the president.


You know what, you are right. I was giving the president far too much credit by comparing him to an ape.

A better assumption would be that Trump will respect a powerful primate to whom he owes large sums of money (so he'll probably have little qualms shouting at generals so long as they are not connected to Russian oligarchs).

But hey, we don't need to resort to ape analogies if we're going to talk about primitive behaviour between aggressive parties who owe money to each other, it's called the mob!
2017-07-31, 3:15 PM #3369
Hitler's law: "As an online discussion about Donald Trump grows longer, the probability of comparison to me decreases, since people realize a better comparison is to the mafia"
2017-07-31, 4:20 PM #3370
Putin could buy Trump 200 times over, even using the most generous estimate of Trump's wealth. If the best comparison to Trump is to the mob, you'd best keep in mind that Trump is barely a lieutenant, not a boss.

Fox News' ideal president isn't Trump, it's Putin.
2017-07-31, 4:28 PM #3371
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Hitler's law: "As an online discussion about Donald Trump grows longer, the probability of comparison to me decreases, since people realize a better comparison is to the mafia"

A key difference being that award winning movies could be written about the mafia.
2017-07-31, 4:29 PM #3372
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/world-richest-people-vladimir-putin-wealth-russian-president-bill-gates-jeff-bezos-combined-a7868606.html

Quote:
Bill Browder, a US financier, reportedly told senators last week that the Russian President is richer than both Mr Bezos and Mr Gates combined.

According to Newsweek, the chief executive officer of Hermitage Capital Management said that he thinks Mr Putin is worth $200bn.

Newsweek said that Mr Browder’s company was once the largest portfolio investor in Russia and that Mr Browder was a shareholder in Gazprom, Surgutneftegas and other Russian state-run enterprises in the 1990s.

Around that time Putin reportedly made a deal with Russian businessmen that made him the “richest man in the world”.
2017-07-31, 9:17 PM #3373
Originally posted by Spook:


Well, yes they are if he follows through on his tweet and issues guidance to the military to disregard the previous administration's orders. Alas, there's no actual indication he will. Thought it was too good to be true but we'll see. I'm guessing he might have kept his twitter finger more steady if he knew McCain was going to show up and totally **** him.

Crazy to see all the chaos in the executive branch. I mean predictable, of course, but still crazy to watch.
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16

2017-07-31, 9:25 PM #3374
It's not like Trump has a lot of experience hiring people to work for him. I'm sure with a little more practice he'll figure it out, have patience.
2017-07-31, 9:30 PM #3375
In light of that fact about Vladimir Putin's wealth and its origin, I think it is sort of telling that consumers of Fox News and Breitbart can hold the views they do and still support Trump. Consider:

  • The alt. right rants about shadowy rich Jewish bankers like the Rothschilds, supposedly because of nebulous and undeserving sources of wealth
  • cold war conservatives have railed against subversive Russian influence over our country for the better part of a century, and generally been hawks when it comes to US vs. Russian military


So, like, what the **** happened? I've been checking Mark Levin's show summary daily to see if he ever opposes Trump. He did it most when Trump attacked Jeff Sessions, but, like, the lion's share each daily episode of the three hour show is a big long rant about repealing Obamacare.

Are things that bad in red states that right wingers abandon all their previous sacred cows, just because Michelle Bachmann told them that Obamacare took their job? :confused:
2017-07-31, 9:34 PM #3376
Originally posted by Jon`C:
It's not like Trump has a lot of experience hiring people to work for him. I'm sure with a little more practice he'll figure it out, have patience.


He has plenty on experience firing people.
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16

2017-07-31, 9:39 PM #3377
Originally posted by Wookie06:
He's tricked plenty of television viewers that he has experience firing people.


FTFY

Originally posted by The New Yorker:
It’s become a wearying, ugly observation, a media truism at once superficial and deep: if “The Apprentice” didn’t get Trump elected, it is surely what made him electable. Over fourteen seasons, the television producer Mark Burnett helped turn the Donald Trump of the late nineties—the disgraced huckster who had trashed Atlantic City; a tabloid pariah to whom no bank would lend—into a titan of industry, nationally admired for being, in his own words, “the highest-quality brand.” And here we were again, at the boardroom table, listening to the compliments to the boss, suspended in that eerie, unstable blend of improvisation and scripting. It was enough to make a television critic nostalgic.
2017-07-31, 9:55 PM #3378
Did you actually think you needed to fix that? I mean, you got the joke, right?
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16

2017-07-31, 10:00 PM #3379
Originally posted by Wookie06:
He has plenty on experience firing people.


Well, as someone with experience hiring people, let me make something perfectly clear to everybody reading this. Every time you have to let someone go, it means you failed. It means you hired too many people, or ran your business poorly, or failed to make your expectations clear, or failed to retask a poor fit, or simply invested in the wrong person. Every time, it's on you. You failed. Not the person you fired; you.

Recruitment and management are basic executive skills, both in business and in government. Trump does not have those skills. If this is how Trump ran his businesses, it's really no surprise that he failed so hard that Russian gangsters had to bail him out.
2017-07-31, 10:06 PM #3380
Originally posted by Wookie06:
Did you actually think you needed to fix that? I mean, you got the joke, right?


What's there to get? He has that famous line, "you're fired", popularized from the apprentice, but as Jon`C points out, it's nothing to be proud of.

I linked to the New Yorker article because it brings up the more interesting question, which is: why would somebody with such an idiotic slogan become a strong enough brand to become president?
2017-07-31, 10:07 PM #3381
Like, I don't know why so many internets are making fun of Scaramucci for getting fired. Trump's the one who was friends with him, hired him, and "soured on him" all within 10 days. You don't need to do much digging into Scaramucci to realize he's emotionally unstable and has poor impulse control. How does hiring someone like him even happen, if that's not the kind of person you want on your staff? And why do you hire anybody when your Chief of Staff is on the chopping block, too? That'd be like hiring a new VP of HR while your COO is in the doghouse, it's just not something you do.

I mean, I know it's getting worn out to call Trump incompetent, but... Trump is incompetent. At hiring people. Like, we're talking retarded-at-business, can't-exploit-labor kind of incompetent. And yet, he's a rich and successful businessman!

If you have any faith left in capitalism, this should destroy it.
2017-07-31, 10:09 PM #3382
Trump needs to fire lots of people for the same reason that Michael Jackson had to sell a lot of the **** he bought over the years just to stay in the black.

Edit: just to be clear, that last adjective was about accounting, not surgery to hide vitiligo. Although who knows, maybe Trump blew all his inherited wealth on trying to stay orange.
2017-07-31, 10:18 PM #3383
Quote:
How does hiring someone like him even happen, if that's not the kind of person you want on your staff


Answer: Trump himself has all the weakness you listed, and is arrogant enough to see them as strengths until the bitter end.
2017-08-01, 12:07 AM #3384
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
Trump needs to fire lots of people for the same reason that Michael Jackson had to sell a lot of the **** he bought over the years just to stay in the black.


but he didn't stay in the black
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-08-01, 12:21 AM #3385
Hehe yeah I kinda realized that after I wrote that
2017-08-01, 12:57 AM #3386
MJ was the first transhuman

not the outofarmy kind though
Epstein didn't kill himself.
2017-08-01, 1:27 AM #3387
https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/shareholder-value-is-killing-innovation

Quote:
The insignificance of the stock market as a source of real investment capital exposes as fallacious the fundamental assumptions of the prevailing ideology that, for the sake of economic efficiency, a business corporation should be run to “maximize shareholder value” (MSV). As a rule, public shareholders do not invest in a corporation’s productive capabilities; they simply buy shares outstanding on the market, hoping to extract value that they have played no role in helping to create. And in practice, MSV advocates modes of corporate resource allocation that undermine innovative enterprise and result in unstable employment, inequitable incomes, and sagging productivity.

The most obvious manifestations of the corporate misbehavior that MSV incentivizes are the lavish, stock-based incomes of top corporate executives and the massive distributions of corporate cash to shareholders in the form of stock buybacks, coming on top of already-ample dividends. Indeed, with stock-based pay incentivizing senior executives to do stock buybacks—i.e., having a company repurchase its own shares to give manipulative boosts to its stock price—over the past three decades the stock market has had a negative cash function. On the whole, U.S. business corporations fund the stock market, not vice versa.


That's capitalism
2017-08-01, 7:02 AM #3388
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
I linked to the New Yorker article because it brings up the more interesting question, which is: why would somebody with such an idiotic slogan become a strong enough brand to become president?


Well, the slogan conveys that Trump is unsentimental and willing to make tough decisions in order to win, no matter who is destroyed along the way. He'll do "whatever it takes". Plus it implies that he has that je ne sais que quality that it takes to be successful. And it colors him as the gatekeeper who gets to decide who joins the upper echelons of wealth and power in NYC.

And in terms of the brand... There's definitely a tension there. He's part of the upper class by birth, but he has a working class mentality, having been born in Queens and having always felt excluded from the true elites in Manhattan. He rebelled against it, and turned his nose up at the mores and customs of the upper class financial elite in Manhattan. He's in the elite, but not of it. The stupidity, the kitsch, the vulgarity, the ostentatiousness and the opulence, the complete lack of sophistication or refinement or taste, despite using words like "classy" all the time -- all of which can be found in his tv show -- that's all precisely what gives him and his brand populist appeal. And it's what makes "elites" recoil at him. And the fact they do so adds even more to his populist appeal. He's the personification of his anti-elite campaign message.
former entrepreneur
2017-08-01, 7:57 AM #3389
Originally posted by Wookie06:
Well, yes they are if he follows through on his tweet and issues guidance to the military to disregard the previous administration's orders. Alas, there's no actual indication he will. Thought it was too good to be true but we'll see.


Help me out on why it was too good to be true. Why would you, no doubt a patriotic American, wish for the military to reject a good number of loyal, effective servicemen and women for being transgender? I understand feeling antipathetic toward transgender people on a general level. That's a knee-jerk reaction against that which threatens the sense of security, a natural bias against something one perceives to be out of the ordinary. What I don't understand is why you would not look past that in theory and realize that it makes no practical sense for the military to discriminate on that basis.
Looks like we're not going down after all, so nevermind.
2017-08-01, 2:21 PM #3390
Quote:
Help me out on why it was too good to be true.


Yeah, I am pretty sure he trolled you.

Nobody on this board could possibly be so bigoted that, prima facie, they bluntly, and without any further explanation, celebrate the exclusion of a minority of the population from participating in society as equal citizens.
2017-08-01, 2:25 PM #3391
I mean, if this really did come down to policy, what is so significant about this particular regulation that would elicit enough emotion to care?

I guess since Wookie is a veteran, I could retract my previous post and give him the benefit of the doubt that he is simply a wonk when it comes to this issue because of his own personal experience and wisdom about what works well.

(And for the record, I don't think he's a bigot.)
2017-08-01, 2:31 PM #3392
Originally posted by Krokodile:
Why would you [...] wish for the military to reject a good number of loyal, effective servicemen and women for being transgender? [It] makes no practical sense for the military to discriminate on that basis.


So I edited your post down to the essentials. It's plain to see that your questions are filled with your opinions so they're not really honest questions. They're loaded. That's okay but clearly I have to take this into account in addressing them.

So if the estimates are correct, well even if they're wildly overestimated, there's fewer than one percent of the military that identifies as transgender and certainly most of their service precedes any official policy admitting them. I see that the estimate is 0.3% of the population is transgender. I don't know what constitutes a "good number" but based on the estimates I don't think it's impractical to deny transgenders especially considering the military has been reducing force size. So from a readiness standpoint there really doesn't seem to be a downside to reversing the previous administrations policy change.

I support reinstating the disqualification on the following bases.

First, transgender suicide rates are very high. Military and veteran suicide rates are shockingly high to begin with. This is simply not a good combination.

Second, with the military now having to treat gender dysphoria and perform surgeries for transgender service members the Veterans Administration medical system will now be obligated to treat these conditions as well as provide compensation for these issues as service connected disabilities. This is a little bit of inside baseball here but there is a tremendous issue here where veterans are essentially the new welfare queens. It's not politically correct and you're not going to hear too many people say it but it's 100% true. I just find it ridiculous that the military will be providing these services and then the VA will be further burdened when they're discharged.

Lastly, you just don't accomplish real social change with a policy like this. Why are transgender suicide rates so high? I don't know to what degree it is due to society or mental/psychological illness but true acceptance and integration takes time. One hundred years after the civil war Johnson was still blocking equal rights for blacks. Transgender is a psychological issue with real physical ramifications once you start factoring in elective surgeries. No matter how tolerant I am, that doesn't make transgenders the best candidates for military service.

Transgenders as a group are a troubled segment of the population. The military has many qualification standards, lowered when demand to fill the services are high and raised when they're low. Everyday people are disqualified for failing to pass a test, failing to achieve an educational certificate, failing a drug test, failing a physical, some stupid law violation, etc. Oh, and by the way, personnel on active duty that become disqualified for continued service are released all the time as well as soldiers that are fully qualified but selected for release because the military no longer needs them. It's not like transgenders are some lone category singled out for exclusion.

It might not sound nice but the military really isn't a very nice place.
"I would rather claim to be an uneducated man than be mal-educated and claim to be otherwise." - Wookie 03:16

2017-08-01, 2:49 PM #3393
Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Whose gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
2017-08-01, 3:16 PM #3394
Originally posted by Wookie06:
This is a little bit of inside baseball here but there is a tremendous issue here where veterans are essentially the new welfare queens.

lol
2017-08-01, 3:19 PM #3395
Originally posted by Jon`C:
It's terrible advice because it's coming from a terrible place. Successful people - especially successful creatives - largely don't understand why they were successful. Success is basically random, and it is inexplicable in that way. Also, though, is the fact that most successful people didn't think about success or creative process on the road to becoming successful. Instead, once they are already successful, they reconstitute some process in retrospect from tainted biographical memories, which are biased toward our feelings and firsthand experiences, rather than the other factors that influenced our lives.

What Scott Adams is really saying is that there must be some reason, within his control, that someone who isn't funny and can't draw could end up creating a popular comic strip about a boring subject. But of course there isn't any reason, it is a stupid thing that never should have happened. Adams really doesn't know how to handle that, so he goes looking for the secret sauce: the "invisible hand" and the "rare combination of being awful at three things", and then suggests being bad at stuff is some kind of goal that other people should set in order to become successful.

Ignoring the whole fact that Dilbert is a literally terrible thing, and only ever got popular because in the mid 90s some office workers started pinning it to their cubicle walls to passive aggressively thumb their noses at management, and the whole thing caught on from there. Nobody ever liked it, it just became a "thing" - a viral meme, I guess we'd call it today - by some random freak luck.


I mean, you're not wrong, but I don't think "success is random" is a very motivating position to hold. At some level you have to believe your efforts will lead to (or at least increase the chance of) success.

Originally posted by Eversor:
There's a lot about that article that is ridiculous. But...

If Obama's only competing against Carter and Bill Clinton, it's not an unreasonable claim.

And in terms of foreign policy, I think it is fair to say that, as a candidate, Obama stood as an alternative to the interventionist tendencies of Clinton democrats/neoconservatives, and, in the time that he was president, Americans' expectations concerning how American military force should be deployed globally shifted to a less interventionist posture. There's a reason why Obama claims standing up to "the blob" about not enforcing his redline (by which he meant resisting pressure from the interventionist military establishment) was the greatest single foreign policy achievement of his presidency. In some ways, it embodied the anti-war, anti-interventionist strain that defined his foreign policy aspirations (of course, those aspirations didn't always impact how his foreign policy worked in practice).

And on this point, Obama's legacy will endure. At least rhetorically, Trump's foreign policy much more closely resembles Obama's than Bush 43's.


Yeah, what you've said here is accurate, I was lol'ing mostly about the tone of admiration they were taking.
2017-08-01, 3:20 PM #3396
Quote:
lol


Why is that funny? Not taking his side necessarily, just curious. Don't respond if you don't want to though, this is only mildly interesting to me.
2017-08-01, 3:20 PM #3397
Originally posted by Wookie06:
Lastly, you just don't accomplish real social change with a policy like this. Why are transgender suicide rates so high? I don't know to what degree it is due to society or mental/psychological illness but true acceptance and integration takes time.


Might have something to do with being treated as an unpeople who have nothing to contribute to society and whose problems are too hard and expensive to bother solving. I dunno.
2017-08-01, 3:23 PM #3398
Quote:
I mean, you're not wrong, but I don't think "success is random" is a very motivating position to hold. At some level you have to believe your efforts will lead to (or at least increase the chance of) success.


There are kernels of truth in what Adams is advising, but frankly, there are some people I don't want to succeed.
2017-08-01, 3:29 PM #3399
Originally posted by Reid:
I mean, you're not wrong, but I don't think "success is random" is a very motivating position to hold. At some level you have to believe your efforts will lead to (or at least increase the chance of) success.


Re: Effort.

You can't win the lottery unless you buy a ticket.
2017-08-01, 5:17 PM #3400
Originally posted by Reverend Jones:
There are kernels of truth in what Adams is advising, but frankly, there are some people I don't want to succeed.


The one kernel of truth is that you can't write what you don't know. Adams was only passable at writing Dilbert because he had business experience to draw upon (distressingly out of date, however). You can't create anything without drawing deeply from experience and knowledge.

However, that isn't a novel statement and it's not what he was trying to say, anyway.
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