Donald Trump finally announced as some massive in-joke (Part 1)

Crazy idea,but couldn’t we go back to the days when humans made things?

Or do we all need 4 tellys,3,ipads etc etc

Has all this cheap stuff actually made anyone happier?

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We have porn on handheld devices. Your argument is invalid.

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Because people don’t want to pay for it in short. Just imagine the increased costs of food if for example you did away with tractors.

I put it down to poor education and the commoditisation of the media/news. The Brexit debate was a good example: if you vote remain you must love the EU. The US election was the same: If you don’t vote Trump you must love Clinton etc etc. Chuck in Fox News in the USA and the usual shits in the UK media and mix with a population that is very poorly educated and is largely conditioned to like/dislike (a la Facebook) rather than discuss/dispute/think about issues and you get 90% of the way to the mess we are in.

Or not…:thinking:

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I thought the Observer article you linked to earlier made a strong point. People voted for Trump because the political system let them down. Most constitutional systems of government separate the legislature from the executive. But in the US they’ve arranged that those two are elected independently. If, as is commonly the case, they’re not in genuine agreement then it’s easy for either to sabotage every effort by the other to improve things. And it’s more important to ensure that your opponent fails than it is to do the best for the people. As such there can be decades of no significant improvement. Trump, on the other hand, promised to change this. Somehow he was going to deliver change despite the institutional blocks which had prevented much smarter people than him from achieving it. Let’s see if he manages.

VB

They all look like fucking Bond or superhero villains. Conway looks like fucking Twoface from Batman.

orly?

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Sometimes we do, but we keep the clever stuff here, Dyson did this. I remember watching a documentary on the new mini line Inn Oxford. No human involved in the welding side, fully automated over a couple of hundred stations. Highly skilled maintenance team though.

The more Bespoke and skilled it is the better we are at it. McLaren, Rolls, Range Rover, vox olympian etc.

What bugs me is when government subsidies something like wind turbine technology and had no coherent industrial strategy to allow UK industry to invest, instead we import the lot. That is so short sighted.

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I have been round their new engine factory. Almost nobody there.

Yes, the days of an engine factory making everything from iron and steel ingots are long gone. The machine operator and maintainers in that factory will be high skill though, a fair smattering of HNCs on the floor.

When I was a kid the pop sociologists reckoned the biggest problem facing humanity would be how we would occupy all our leisure time once the robots had taken over all the jobs. It turned out that we actually had a choice between

a) settling for what we’d got (this was the 1960’s, so fewer than one car per household, seasonal veg, three TV channels, no internet of course, minimal foreign travel, hardly anyone with more complex financial investments than a repayment mortgage and a savings account, life expectancy of seventy-small) or

b) allowing the robots to take over the drudge stuff while we worked even harder to deliver more interesting/challenging things. On the whole we chose b). But we may now be hitting a limit in terms of how many more interesting/challenging things people are prepared to work to pay for. If we can’t come up with more ‘desirable’ stuff then leisure may be forced upon us.

VB

Control in Trumps case does not have to be (although he would prefer it) positive - Simple dominance seemed quite effective. Rhetoric which seems abominable if repeated and supported by ‘Alt facts’ will win many over - See Daily Mail / Fox news etc.

“The reason inheres in journalists’ tendency to build their narratives around the candidates’ positions in the race. This horserace focus leads them into four storylines: a candidate is ‘leading,’ ‘trailing,’ ‘gaining ground,’ or ‘losing ground.’ Of the four storylines, the most predictably positive one is that of the ‘gaining ground’ candidate, particularly when that candidate is emerging from the back of the pack. It’s a story of growing momentum, rising poll numbers, and ever larger crowds. The storyline invariably includes negative elements, typically around the tactics that the candidate is employing in the surge to the top. But the overall media portrayal of a ‘gaining ground’ candidate is a positive one.”

Is the spelling of ‘heard’ there meant to be subtle ? And sheep would have been a much better analogy. Pigs can be independent unruly so-and-so’s.

VB

Alt fact - Pigs wallow in shit.

Pigly

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As always, Private Eye excels.

There seems to be the additional point that all these people thought it was Obama not doing anything to help them, whereas in almost all cases it was the GOP led Houses either blocking or significantly damaging legislation going through. For example most of the grievances people had with the Affordable Care Act were areas where the GOP had deliberately taken steps to weaken and damage the effectiveness of the legislation.

In short, the GOP are a complete bunch of racists cunts who will literally stop at nothing to get what they want, preferably fucking over as many people as possible in the process.

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I think we need JBC here to add a balanced view :thumbsup:

No. Fucking. Way.

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It could be fun :grinning: