marcusgarvey

> I've been thinking off and on about how to start a channel since it's clearly a great way to pay for kids' toys based on the one show we watched where a kid and his dad assembled a gigantic Spider-Man drivable car.

There's your self-licking ice cream clone. I wonder why it's so pleasurable to watch these kind of unboxing vids. Mirror neurons?

Over 17 million views on...this. Wow. Good on her. Thanks for clueing me in to the genre.

>Those youtube videos of people with toys are nuts

What is this referring to, exactly? Videos of (adults?) playing with toys?

I'm not talking about all the world's ills but rather 4 recent events with global, often disastrous consequences. Perhaps it is news to you, but there is a certain kind of person who makes their daily bread on the strength of their supposed expertise in politics, economics and finance. Think tankers, Davos panelists, former political appointees, the experts commonly cited in papers like the FT, NYTimes, WaPo, and the journalists and editorialists who give them ink and air time. They didn't see these events coming, despite the fact that the dynamics leading up to each one had been building for some time. They never seem to admit that they were wrong, and seemingly no one expects them to as they continue to carry on on the lecture and cited expert circuits. Worst of all, they do not seem to recognize that they are just as vulnerable to groupthink as anyone and they never seem to improve their methods of investigation which for me would mean consciously traveling out of the media capitals of New York, DC and London to visit and talk to people in other parts to get a better handle on popular sentiment; being hyper aware of when they might be trading integrity for access and status; and not being too prideful to take a look at alternative points of view from bloggers and commentators who do not trod the same carpeted halls.

Iraq, the surprising arrival of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, Brexit shock, rise of Trump...the commentator classes of New York, DC, London and other "tastemaker" cities need to reckon with their failures and understand why they were so utterly wrong. Instead, in most cases, we see doubling down and demonization of the other side. It's quite extraordinary. The black swans are coming fast and thick.

Substantive issues aside, Holmes seems to be getting very bad PR advice.

>Taxpayers may well be pulled into the fray and suffer as well in these situations.

How might this happen - do you mean via the Transbay Dev.?

I'm surprised, too, but I don't think nuking it is the right answer. That's just what these folks want.

How so?

>"I feel like I'm living in the movie Brazil."

Says the Soylent salesman. Irony!

Interesting to read the actual report (edit: actually BCG's summary of the report) and compare it with the Bloomberg article. BCG's using this report to make the case that private sector involvement, especially from financial services, leads to high social benefit. But this must not be a linear relationship, or it can be strongly offset by other factors. Otherwise the U.S. -- with all its private enterprise and as home to some of the world's biggest/most influential banks -- should be top of the list. But per the article:

>The United States' ability to convert both wealth and growth into well-being is below par globally, while Germany manages to perform above par on both fronts.

https://www.bcgperspectives.com/content/articles/growth-glob...

Oh wow, the Department of Justice actually went after someone at HSBC. Are they trying to compensate for a recent report that concludes it let HSBC skate on its criminal money laundering business because it was too big to jail?

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/house-committee-says-hsbc-w...

And for background on the blatant money laundering they enabled: >drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/outrageous-hsbc-se...

For me the stream of consciousness style didn't work at all. But I'm referring specifically to these passages of the article, which set the novel in a new context for me. I always appreciate hearing someone else's well-articulated reasons for why they adore something that I did not, particularly when the sheer joy of their experience shines through.

>Joyce picked June 16 as the time of the novel partly to commemorate his first date with his future wife (more on that in a moment), but also because it was an otherwise ordinary day, on which ordinary people did ordinary things. Like the rest of literary and artistic modernity, the novel pits the epic against the mundane, and Joyce’s version toes the line with virtuosity.

and

>Ulysses bathes in low-culture vulgarity, even if it’s hard for today’s reader to see it clearly. The choice of June 16 as an homage to his future wife’s first date is partly romantic, but partly bawdy, too.

>Instead of standing on the shoulders of giants in faux-humble deference to tradition, as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot had done by incorporating classical references and source material, Joyce devoured and disgorged them again. And it was beautiful and real, like watching a drunk heave outside a pub in the wee hours of the morning. This is life.

There's a piece of writing advice I like: "Take pity on your reader." Stream of consciousness style writing at such length is very painful to read. So I never understood why an author would do it, but for some kind of self-gratification that strikes me as pretentious. Now this article has explained that Joyce had a goal that I often think about in relation to my often humdrum life, elevating the ordinary. I have a bit more respect for this now. Perhaps not enough to read the thing again, but still.

I am so glad to have come across this article; thank you. Since an aborted attempt to read it -- with its hundreds of pages of stream-of-consciousness -- I have always wondered why this book was so praised.

Let's enhance said terms.

1. Government server - whatever the gov sets up. Chief attribute(s): security

2. Private sector email provider - a service like hotmail or gmail. Chief attribute(s): convenience and security.

3. Personal homebrew server - something on a box you hire someone to set up for you. Chief attribute(s): control and convenience.

A public servant who would use #2 for testing purposes so that they can execute the duties of their jobs is one thing. A public servant who would go to the lengths needed to secure #3, thereby placing their complete archive beyond the reach of the public but well within the reach of intruders, has in my view used their public office for private gain at the potential cost of national security. Their motives and judgment are entirely dubious.

Last year a Folsom engineer and retired Navy commander was fined $7,500 and placed on two years of probation for transferring classified data from a government computer to a personal computer. The investigation “did not reveal evidence that Nishimura intended to distribute classified information to unauthorized personnel.”

http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article29506825.html

But the distinction is material.

False. They did not have private servers.

>there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

>Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way

What is the difference between "extremely careless", which he says she was, and "grossly negligent", which he implies she wasn't?

>previous people in the same position also had private servers

Such as?

I can think of at least two scenarios where that doesn't quite hold: in times of war and also in times when austerity-espousing politicians "have" to make budget cuts and focus those cuts on social welfare programs. Then comes all the flowery language in support of "shared sacrifice" for the greater good. Then, they are usually able to make very persuasive arguments for inflicting short-term pain. One would think these same politicians could use their rhetorical power to help avoid cataclysmic climate change.

>A promise to cut subsidies was first made at a G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh in 2009, but since then very little progress has been made

So seven years and counting.

>[U.S. Secretary of Energy] Moniz said the United States would eventually need legislative action in Congress to reach longer-term emissions goals, but he said that he believed public pressure for Congress to act would mount as sea levels rise and “Mother Nature’s voice” continues to get louder.

Translation: Nothing will be done until things take an unambiguously disastrous turn -- if then. How reassuring.

Can't help but wonder if this has something to do with the recent allegations against them of having a bias against certain kinds of news.

I think it's time for the powers that be to activate Plan B. I would prefer Plan B to be something like a basic income. But it could also be out-of-the-box ideas, like "let's have a major war to distract the homefront and focus energy on an external enemy."

Combine this current sentiment with the results from the job losses to come from self-driving vehicles and automation...volatility ahead.

For everything there is a season. Globalism had a great reputation at the turn of the millennium. Then we had Iraq, the Great Financial Crisis and Syria, which damaged the credibility of the leadership class. So now status quo in the west cannot be taken for granted.

Nice to read about a new breakthrough in botany. The field doesn't get much attention at all. Maybe now it will benefit from the popularity of Martian, the movie.

What's their pricing model, if you don't mind my asking? They provide very little info on their website.

Who else has used Ample Market? Pros? Cons?