US Politics Mega-thread - Page 9402

On December 04 2017 04:14 hunts wrote:


How so? Or do you just want to say that with no reason and hope for it to be the end of that?

On December 04 2017 04:15 Jockmcplop wrote:


I'm guessing because there are many tv shows that present opinion without being either news or fake news.

On December 04 2017 03:00 Nevuk wrote:



www.cbsnews.com

Even though they're tongue in cheek it makes it easy for people to dismiss certain allegations like this

On December 04 2017 03:21 Zambrah wrote:
I feel like the "its just a joke, guys!" is so obnoxious because so many dumb, dumb Americans don't know its a joke, they take it literally. They think major news networks just wholly fabricate stories out of nothing. Because they're too dumb to get tongue-in-cheek humor.

Not saying that plenty of major news networks always properly cite and source and do their homework before publishing, but thats still a step away from Pizzagate actual fabricated stories.

Trump Finds Loopholes in Chief of Staff’s New Regime

WASHINGTON—Chief of Staff John Kelly over the past five months has imposed discipline and rigorous protocols on a freewheeling White House. But President Donald Trump has found the loopholes.

The president on occasion has called White House aides to the private residence in the evening, where he makes assignments and asks them not tell Mr. Kelly about the plans, according to several people familiar with the matter. At least once, aides have declined to carry out the requested task so as not to run afoul of Mr. Kelly, one of these people said.

The president, who values counsel from an informal group of confidants outside the White House, also sometimes bypasses the normal scheduling for phone calls that give other White House staff, including Mr. Kelly, some control and influence over who the president talks to and when.

Instead, some of his friends have taken to calling Melania Trump and asking her to pass messages to her husband, according to two people familiar with the matter. They say that since she arrived in the White House from New York in the summer, the first lady has taken on a more central role as a political adviser to the president.

“If I don’t want to wait 24 hours for a call from the president, getting to Melania is much easier,” one person said.

A spokeswoman for Mrs. Trump said: “This is more fake news and these are more anonymous sources peddling things that just aren’t true. The First Lady is focused on her own work in the East Wing.” The White House declined to provide comment.

Mr. Kelly has frequently said that it is his job to control the White House below the president, rather than the president himself. The president’s penchant for what one confidant dubbed “workarounds” to the new White House protocols shows the limits of Mr. Kelly’s approach.

“John has been successful at putting in place a stronger chain of command in the White House, requiring people to go through him to get to the Oval Office,” said Leon Panetta, a White House chief of staff under President Bill Clinton who worked with Mr. Kelly, a four-star Marine general, in the Department of Defense. “The problem has always been whether or not the president is going to accept better discipline in the way he operates. He’s been less successful at that.”

Still, White House staffers say that Mr. Trump’s working relationship with Mr. Kelly remains strong and that the two men appear to have found an equilibrium that suggests Mr. Kelly could be in place for a long time, with the chief of staff focusing on running White House operations while the president takes a freer hand with his own agenda and communications, even if that at times leaves the chief of staff out of the loop.

“This is all just inevitable,” said one person close to Mr. Trump. “It’s not that Mr. Kelly is wrong—we all know he’s terribly competent.”

Presidents have long made a point of staying in contact with friends and outside advisers; former President Barack Obama successfully argued with handlers to keep his BlackBerry to remain in touch with the world beyond the White House. What’s striking about Mr. Trump’s actions is that he is circumventing protocols that advisers say are intended to help him.

Since arriving in July, Mr. Kelly has clamped down on a number of practices that aides say made the White House’s internal operations chaotic in the first several months of the Trump presidency. He has told staff there will be no more patching through calls from Trump friends outside the White House who wanted to weigh in on the news; instead they would need appointments. And he stopped aides from wandering into the Oval Office to try to get time with the president.

Mr. Kelly has never aspired to control the president’s Twitter feed, however, which continues to create news, promote the president’s agenda and draw criticism. Just last week, Mr. Trump’s tweets prompted top congressional Democrats to cancel a meeting to discuss the looming deadline for a deal to avoid a government shutdown. He also​ drew a rebuke from British Prime Minister Theresa May for retweeting videos posted by a far-right British nationalist group that purported to show violence committed by Muslims.

On Nov. 12, with many of Mr. Trump’s senior military and diplomatic advisers arguing for diplomacy with North Korea, the president tweeted that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, was “short and fat.” Asked about the tweet, posted during the president’s trip to Asia, Mr. Kelly shrugged.

“Believe it or not—I don’t follow the tweets,” he said, adding that he urges White House policy staff not to be influenced by the missives and does not himself use Twitter. “We develop policy in the normal traditional staff way.”

Those who have watched the two men interact said their personalities are too different to ever be very close. “Kelly is too much of a general, and Trump is too much Trump,” one White House official said. But Mr. Trump continues to hold Mr. Kelly in high regard, these people say. He frequently calls out Mr. Kelly during his public appearances.

At a briefing on Hurricane Maria relief efforts in Puerto Rico earlier in the fall, Mr. Trump noted Mr. Kelly’s presence in the back of the room.

“He likes to keep a low profile; Look at him sitting in the back,” Mr. Trump continued. “But, boy, is he watching—you have no idea.”

On December 04 2017 04:28 Danglars wrote:

The term evolved to mean stories that twist the truth or tell complete falsehood. I still find it humorous that journos in Nov/Dec 2016 didn’t anticipate the lynchpin term of their narrative falling prey to counter-spin.

On December 03 2017 20:49 Gahlo wrote:

Amazon employs far less people than the businesses that it replaces. Plus Amazon is shit to its workers. If you wipe out retail outside of Amazon there will be mass unemployment. Amazon is basically online Walmart.

But we still value humans according to the value of their labour.

On December 04 2017 05:12 mozoku wrote:
Sure, but we're not even sure human labor is becoming increasingly obsolete yet. Historically, technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed.

On December 04 2017 04:28 Danglars wrote:

The term evolved to mean stories that twist the truth or tell complete falsehood. I still find it humorous that journos in Nov/Dec 2016 didn’t anticipate the lynchpin term of their narrative falling prey to counter-spin.

On December 04 2017 05:16 xDaunt wrote:
We have always found ways to reallocate human capital in light of technological changes. There is no reason to believe that won’t continue. Just think of all of the types of jobs that exist today that were unimaginable just a generation ago.

On December 04 2017 05:30 Ciaus_Dronu wrote:


There's plenty of reason.
None of the prior technological advancements allowed one person to run an entire damn factor.
Further, technological change is an accelerating process, especially in light of AI coming onto the scene. The kind of job turnover we are going to see in the next decade is going to happen very very fast and be widespread.
Further, let's say there will be your proposed openings in new types of job. Very high chance these jobs are not going to be all that unskilled (by virtue of the fact that now technology will easily make such a job obsolete as it emerges), so it will take training and money (likely that of the workers, by their own unemployed pockets) and time to adapt to these positions opening up. Transitioning into basic factory work required decidedly less so, to look at history for a moment.

Also, by the way AI research is going, it's not just manual labour that's going to go out the window. A frightening amount of accounting, law and administration is beginning to look like it could be automated.