[News] Post a Political News Story

Ongoing discussion of the political news of the day. This thread is for 'smaller' stories that don't call for their own thread. If a story blows up, please start a new thread for it.

This is why white men should not be allowed to write and pass laws.

With all due respect, sexualized violence and legal indifference to it knows no racial background.

Hey! Remember this movie?

IMAGE(http://img.moviepostershop.com/first-kid-movie-poster-1996-1020367766.jpg)

Neither do I, really.

You, a Moron: What does this have to do with this thread? Why are you posting it here?

Me, a Brain Genius: ALLOW ME TO EDUCATE YOU MY FRIEND

Making a Crypto Utopia in Puerto Rico

SAN JUAN, P.R. — They call what they are building Puertopia. But then someone told them, apparently in all seriousness, that it translates to “eternal boy playground” in Latin. So they are changing the name: They will call it Sol.

Dozens of entrepreneurs, made newly wealthy by blockchain and cryptocurrencies, are heading en masse to Puerto Rico this winter. They are selling their homes and cars in California and establishing residency on the Caribbean island in hopes of avoiding what they see as onerous state and federal taxes on their growing fortunes, some of which now reach into the billions of dollars.

And these men — because they are almost exclusively men — have a plan for what to do with the wealth: They want to build a crypto utopia, a new city where the money is virtual and the contracts are all public, to show the rest of the world what a crypto future could look like. Blockchain, a digital ledger that forms the basis of virtual currencies, has the potential to reinvent society — and the Puertopians want to prove it.

For more than a year, the entrepreneurs had been searching for the best location. After Hurricane Maria decimated Puerto Rico’s infrastructure in September and the price of cryptocurrencies began to soar, they saw an opportunity and felt a sense of urgency.

So this crypto community flocked here to create its paradise. Now the investors are spending their days hunting for property where they could have their own airports and docks. They are taking over hotels and a museum in the capital’s historic section, called Old San Juan. They say they are close to getting the local government to allow them to have the first cryptocurrency bank.

“What’s happened here is a perfect storm,” said Halsey Minor, the founder of the news site CNET, who is moving his new blockchain company — called Videocoin — from the Cayman Islands to Puerto Rico this winter. Referring to Hurricane Maria and the investment interest that has followed, he added, “While it was really bad for the people of Puerto Rico, in the long term it’s a godsend if people look past that.”

Puerto Rico offers an unparalleled tax incentive: no federal personal income taxes, no capital gains tax and favorable business taxes — all without having to renounce your American citizenship. For now, the local government seems receptive toward the crypto utopians; the governor will speak at their blockchain summit conference, called Puerto Crypto, in March.

The territory’s go-to blockchain tax lawyer is Giovanni Mendez, 30. He expected the tax expatriates to disappear after Hurricane Maria, but the population has instead boomed.

“It’s increased monumentally,” said Mr. Mendez, who has about two dozen crypto clients. “And they all came together.”

The movement is alarming an earlier generation of Puerto Rico tax expats like the hedge fund manager Robb Rill, who runs a social group for those taking advantage of the tax incentives.

“They call me up saying they’re going to buy 250,000 acres so they can incorporate their own city, literally start a city in Puerto Rico to have their own crypto world,” said Mr. Rill, who moved to the island in 2013. “I can’t engage in that.”

The newcomers are still debating the exact shape that Puertopia should take. Some think they need to make a city; others think it’s enough to move into Old San Juan. Puertopians said, however, that they hoped to move very fast.

“You’ve never seen an industry catalyze a place like you’re going to see here,” Mr. Minor said.

.....................

Other Puertopians arrived on the roof as a pack, just back from a full-day property-hunting bus tour. From the middle, Brock Pierce, 37, the leader of the Puertopia movement, emerged wearing drop crotch capri pants, a black vest that almost hit his knees and a large black felt hat. He and others had arrived on the island in early December.

“Compassion, respect, financial transparency,” Mr. Pierce said when asked what was guiding them here.

Mr. Pierce, the director of the Bitcoin Foundation, is a major figure in the crypto boom. He co-founded a blockchain-for-business start-up, Block.One, which has sold around $200 million of a custom virtual currency, EOS, in a so-called initial coin offering. The value of all the outstanding EOS tokens is around $6.5 billion.

A former child actor, Mr. Pierce got into digital money early as a professional gamer, mining and trading gold in the video game World of Warcraft, an effort funded partly by Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump adviser. Mr. Pierce is a controversial figure — he has previously been sued for fraud, among other matters.

Downstairs, in the Monastery penthouse, a dozen or so other expats were hanging out. The water was out that night, so the toilets and faucets were dry. Mr. Minor lounged on an alcove chaise.

“The U.S. doesn’t want us. It’s trying to choke off this economy,” Mr. Minor said, referring to the difficulties that crypto investors have with American banks. “There needs to be a place where people are free to invent.”

Mr. Pierce paced the room with his hands in fists. A few times a day, he played a video for the group on his phone and a portable speaker: Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 “The Great Dictator,” in which Chaplin parodies Hitler rallying his forces. He finds inspiration in lines like “More than machinery, we need humanity.”

Yes, the guy who played the lead in "First Kid" opposite Sinbad is now trying to create a cryptocurrency utopia in Puerto Rico. Because 2018.

EDIT: BONUS ADDENDUM

The Bitcoin Foundation, a trade group composed of hundreds of individuals and companies involved in the cryptocurrency’s promotion, has been hit with at least a dozen resignations in the wake of the election of a new controversial board member. The board is the most public face of Bitcoin and acts as the governing body for the Bitcoin Foundation, making executive decisions on behalf of its members.

Last Friday, American entrepreneur Brock Pierce was elected as one of two new board members to the body, which now comprises seven people, recently expanded from five.

Fifteen years ago, Pierce cofounded a Southern California startup called Digital Entertainment Network. Despite raising tens of millions in venture capital, that company eventually went under. Not long before the company was slated to have its initial public offering in 1999, Pierce and two other cofounders were named in two civil lawsuits alleging sexual abuse of underage boys. Pierce was never charged criminally.

Last one for today:

What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn

Drew was 8 years old when he was flipping through TV channels at home and landed on “Girls Gone Wild.” A few years later, he came across HBO’s late-night soft-core pornography. Then in ninth grade, he found online porn sites on his phone. The videos were good for getting off, he said, but also sources for ideas for future sex positions with future girlfriends. From porn, he learned that guys need to be buff and dominant in bed, doing things like flipping girls over on their stomach during sex. Girls moan a lot and are turned on by pretty much everything a confident guy does. One particular porn scene stuck with him: A woman was bored by a man who approached sex gently but became ecstatic with a far more aggressive guy.

But around 10th grade, it began bothering Drew, an honor-roll student who loves baseball and writing rap lyrics and still confides in his mom, that porn influenced how he thought about girls at school. Were their breasts, he wondered, like the ones in porn? Would girls look at him the way women do in porn when they had sex? Would they give him blow jobs and do the other stuff he saw?
Drew, who asked me to use one of his nicknames, was a junior when I first met him in late 2016, and he told me some of this one Thursday afternoon, as we sat in a small conference room with several other high school boys, eating chips and drinking soda and waiting for an after-school program to begin. Next to Drew was Q., who asked me to identify him by the first initial of his nickname. He was 15, a good student and a baseball fan, too, and pretty perplexed about how porn translated into real life. Q. hadn’t had sex — he liked older, out-of-reach girls, and the last time he had a girlfriend was in sixth grade, and they just fooled around a bit. So he wasn’t exactly in a good position to ask girls directly what they liked. But as he told me over several conversations, it wasn’t just porn but rough images on Snapchat, Facebook and other social media that confused him. Like the GIF he saw of a man pushing a woman against a wall with a girl commenting: “I want a guy like this.” And the one Drew mentioned of the “pain room” in “Fifty Shades of Grey” with a caption by a girl: “This is awesome!”

Watching porn also heightened Q.’s performance anxiety. “You are looking at an adult,” he told me. “The guys are built and dominant and have a big penis, and they last a long time.” And if you don’t do it like the guys in porn, Drew added, “you fear she’s not going to like you.”

Watching porn also heightened Q.’s performance anxiety. “You are looking at an adult,” he told me. “The guys are built and dominant and have a big penis, and they last a long time.” And if you don’t do it like the guys in porn, Drew added, “you fear she’s not going to like you.”

“It gets in your head,” Q. said. “If this girl wants it, then maybe the majority of girls want it.” He’d heard about the importance of consent in sex, but it felt pretty abstract, and it didn’t seem as if it would always be realistic in the heat of the moment. Out of nowhere was he supposed to say: Can I pull your hair? Or could he try something and see how a girl responded? He knew that there were certain things — “big things, like sex toys or anal” — that he would not try without asking.

“I would just do it,” said another boy, in jeans and a sweatshirt. When I asked what he meant, he said anal sex. He assumed that girls like it, because the women in porn do.

“I would never do something that looked uncomfortable,” Drew said, jumping back into the conversation. “I might say, ‘I’ve seen this in porn — do you want to try it?’ ”

It was almost 4 p.m., and the boys started to gather their backpacks to head to a class known as Porn Literacy. The course, with the official title The Truth About Pornography: A Pornography-Literacy Curriculum for High School Students Designed to Reduce Sexual and Dating Violence, is a recent addition to Start Strong, a peer-leadership program for teenagers headquartered in Boston’s South End and funded by the city’s public-health agency. About two dozen selected high school students attend every year, most of them black or Latino, along with a few Asian students, from Boston public high schools, including the city’s competitive exam schools, and a couple of parochial schools. During most of the year, the teenagers learn about healthy relationships, dating violence and L.G.B.T. issues, often through group discussions, role-playing and other exercises.

But for around two hours each week, for five weeks, the students — sophomores, juniors and seniors — take part in Porn Literacy, which aims to make them savvier, more critical consumers of porn by examining how gender, sexuality, aggression, consent, race, queer sex, relationships and body images are portrayed (or, in the case of consent, not portrayed) in porn.

On average, boys are around 13, and girls are around 14, when they first see pornography, says Bryant Paul, an associate professor at Indiana University’s Media School and the author of studies on porn content and adolescent and adult viewing habits. In a 2008 University of New Hampshire survey, 93 percent of male college students and 62 percent of female students said they saw online porn before they were 18. Many females, in particular, weren’t seeking it out. Thirty-five percent of males said they had watched it 10 or more times during adolescence.

Porn Literacy, which began in 2016 and is the focus of a pilot study, was created in part by Emily Rothman, an associate professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who has conducted several studies on dating violence, as well as on porn use by adolescents. She told me that the curriculum isn’t designed to scare kids into believing porn is addictive, or that it will ruin their lives and relationships and warp their libidos. Instead it is grounded in the reality that most adolescents do see porn and takes the approach that teaching them to analyze its messages is far more effective than simply wishing our children could live in a porn-free world.

I've always found this interesting, because while I am not an anti-porn crusader, I do think there are more significant downsides to the proliferation of porn and "porn culture" (I guess) than some of the sex positive porn-advocates (probably not a wholly accurate designation but I can't think of anything else to call them) I've seen talking about it.

Porn is bad. You wont catch me looking at that stuff with my pants down.

The term I've seen most often is Ethical Porn, which strives to be both financially ethical to all involved, but also generally (to my understanding) strives to be more quote unquote real with its depictions of sexual activity.

Is it bad that as a kid my friends and I watched first kid enough that I could recite the plot for you?

edit: eh, more trivia than contribution.

I think that these days a discussion about porn is a vital part of "the talk".

Hobear wrote:

Is it bad that as a kid my friends and I watched first kid enough that I could recite the plot for you?

Yeah, Prederick saying "Neither do I, really" was actually a huge distraction for me reading the next part of his post.

What do you freaking mean you don't remember First Kid?!

Yonder wrote:

I think that these days a discussion about porn is a vital part of "the talk".

I think even some adults don't realize the extent of what is going on right now.

For example, these days many of the production companies and the major online pornographic sites are owned by a single company called MindGeek (tagline: "Leaders in the design, development, marketing, SEO and management of highly trafficked websites"). This one company is controlling a significant chunk of both production and distribution. They are literally deciding what everyone, including what the kids discussed in that article, are or are not going to be exposed to.

Remember those horrifying YouTube kids videos that are made to chase the algorithm? Same thing is happening with more...adult content. Only it's harder to recognize because we don't talk about it and it already has a big component of crossing taboos.

Hobear wrote:

Is it bad that as a kid my friends and I watched first kid enough that I could recite the plot for you?

I mean, at least it wasn't porn.

Gremlin wrote:
Hobear wrote:

Is it bad that as a kid my friends and I watched first kid enough that I could recite the plot for you?

I mean, at least it wasn't porn.

Wait, I thought it was from Roy Moore's porn stash.

My son's kindergarten class of 21 students had 7 showing up on Tuesday, 13 on Wednesday. It's bad this year.

Navajo Nations first solar project now producing enough electricity for about 13,000 homes

A giant array of solar panels near the famed sandstone buttes of Monument Valley has begun producing electricity for the Navajo Nation at a time when the tribe is bracing for the loss of hundreds of jobs from the impending closure of a nearby coal-fired power plant.

The Kayenta Solar Facility is the first utility-scale solar project on the Navajo Nation, producing enough electricity to power about 13,000 Navajo homes.

The plant comes at a time when the area's energy landscape is shifting.

The coal-fired Navajo Generating Station near Page is set to close in December 2019, leaving a site that both tribal and private entities say has the potential for renewable energy development.

Navajo solar plant breaks new ground

In May of this year, in the shadows of sandstone towers near Monument Valley, an array of 120,000 photovoltaic solar panels fired up for the first time.

In doing so, the Kayenta Solar Facility became the first utility-scale solar project to go operational on the Navajo Nation, producing enough electricity to power about 13,000 Navajo homes.

The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority, which owns the solar plant, touted the project as a major clean energy advancement on a reservation long known for fossil fuel development.

Before the solar plant, “the green economy didn't exist” on the Navajo Nation, said Walter Haase, general manager of NTUA, which is a tribal enterprise. After years of empty promises on renewable energy projects, Haase said the array that spans 200 acres shows that such projects can, in fact, be completed on Navajo land.

Jesus christ. We really are doomed.

Reduced Self-Control after 3 Months of Imprisonment; A Pilot Study

Discussion: Our study suggests that 3 months of imprisonment in an impoverished environment may lead to reduced self-control, measured as increased risk taking and reduced attentional performance. This is a significant and societally relevant finding, as released prisoners may be less capable of living a lawful life than they were prior to their imprisonment, and may be more prone to impulsive risk-taking behavior. In other words, the impoverished environment may contribute to an enhanced risk of reoffending.
farley3k wrote:

Reduced Self-Control after 3 Months of Imprisonment; A Pilot Study

Discussion: Our study suggests that 3 months of imprisonment in an impoverished environment may lead to reduced self-control, measured as increased risk taking and reduced attentional performance. This is a significant and societally relevant finding, as released prisoners may be less capable of living a lawful life than they were prior to their imprisonment, and may be more prone to impulsive risk-taking behavior. In other words, the impoverished environment may contribute to an enhanced risk of reoffending.

But if that was the case then countries that have shorter sentences than here would have less recidivism, but we know that's not the case because we are better than them.

Four companies dominate our daily lives unlike any other in human history: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We love our nifty phones and just-a-click-away services, but these behemoths enjoy unfettered economic domination and hoard riches on a scale not seen since the monopolies of the gilded age. The only logical conclusion? We must bust up big tech.

Considered putting this in the social media thread, but since it covers Amazon, Apple and Google as well and is about tech in general, opted against.

I've benefited enormously from big tech. Prophet, the consulting firm I cofounded in 1992, helped companies navigate a new landscape being reshaped by Google. Red Envelope, the upscale e-commerce company I cofounded in 1997, never would have made it out of the crib if Amazon hadn’t ignited the market’s interest in e-commerce. More recently, L2, which I founded in 2010, was born from the mobile and social waves as companies needed a way to benchmark their performance on new platforms.

The benefits of big tech have accrued for me on another level as well. In my investment portfolio, the appreciation of Amazon and Apple stock restored economic security to my household after being run over in the Great Recession. Finally, Amazon is now the largest recruiter of students from the brand-strategy and digital-marketing courses I teach at NYU Stern School of Business. These firms have been great partners, clients, investments, and recruiters. And the sum of two decades of experience with, and study of, these companies leads me to a singular conclusion: It’s time to break up big tech.

Over the past decade, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google—or, as I call them, “the Four”—have aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history. Together, they have a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion (the GDP of France), a staggering 24 percent share of the S&P 500 Top 50, close to the value of every stock traded on the Nasdaq in 2001.

How big are they? Consider that Amazon, with a market cap of $591 billion, is worth more to the stock market than Walmart, Costco, T. J. Maxx, Target, Ross, Best Buy, Ulta, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bed Bath & Beyond, Saks/Lord & Taylor, Dillard’s, JCPenney, and Sears combined.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Google (now known as Alphabet) are together worth $1.3 trillion. You could merge the world’s top five advertising agencies (WPP, Omnicom, Publicis, IPG, and Dentsu) with five major media companies (Disney, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox, CBS, and Viacom) and still need to add five major communications companies (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, Charter, and Dish) to get only 90 percent of what Google and Facebook are worth together.

And what of Apple? With a market cap of nearly $900 billion, Apple is the most valuable public company. Even more remarkable is that the company registers profit margins of 32 percent, closer to luxury brands Hermès (35 percent) and Ferrari (29 percent) than peers in electronics. In 2016, Apple brought in $46 billion in profits, a haul larger than that of any other American company, including JPMorgan Chase, Johnson & Johnson, and Wells Fargo. What’s more, Apple’s profits were greater than the revenues of either Coca- Cola or Facebook. This quarter, it will clock nearly twice the profits that Amazon has produced in its history.

The Four’s wealth and influence are staggering. How did we get here?

As I wrote in my book, The Four, the only way to build a company with the dominance and mass influence of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple is to appeal to a core human organ that makes adoption of the platform instinctive.

Here’s what war with North Korea would look like

Experts inside and outside the US government who study North Korea say that Kim is a rational leader with a singular focus on maintaining control of his country. They don’t think he’s stupid, or suicidal. And for a long time, they believed that Kim would only use his nuclear weapons if he were facing military defeat and the imminent collapse of his government. It would be the last gasp of a dying regime, one determined to kill as many of its enemies as possible before the end came.

Those assessments have now changed. Most of the experts I spoke to believe North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end. And most of them believe Kim would be making a rational decision, not a crazy or suicidal one, if he gave the launch order.

NathanialG wrote:

Here’s what war with North Korea would look like

Experts inside and outside the US government who study North Korea say that Kim is a rational leader with a singular focus on maintaining control of his country. They don’t think he’s stupid, or suicidal. And for a long time, they believed that Kim would only use his nuclear weapons if he were facing military defeat and the imminent collapse of his government. It would be the last gasp of a dying regime, one determined to kill as many of its enemies as possible before the end came.

Those assessments have now changed. Most of the experts I spoke to believe North Korea would use nuclear weapons at the beginning of a war — not at the end. And most of them believe Kim would be making a rational decision, not a crazy or suicidal one, if he gave the launch order.

Makes perfect sense. It was a sensible strategy when the USSR and USA had it back in the cold war and still makes sense now. Terrifying, I'm so glad the Vice President is busy beating the drums of war down there now.

"Nobody knew dealing with a nuclear North Korea could be so hard."

A war with North Korea would be terrible.

And while the article briefly touched on it, I'm not sure that the peace and reunification that follows would be any better.

Even if reunification happened tomorrow and without a shot being fired I don't think South Korea or the US (or the world) would honestly know how to reintegrate 25 million brainwashed and impoverished people into a modern, affluent, and democratic society. I doubt you could even remotely compare to German reunification (which was politically challenging and cost like like two trillion euros).

And if it happened after massive bloodshed, with Chinese troops occupying parts of North Korea, with millions of starving North Koreans flooding across the DMZ (some of which would be North Korean true believers looking for payback in the form of terror attacks), the situation will be even worse.

And that's before all the political games happen, with every regional power looking to shape reunification to their advantage.

We just have to look at what we did in Iraq to see that breaking a country with our military is so much easier than putting it back together. Which is kinda why no previous president has pushed for a military solution to North Korea--there isn't one whose price is worth paying.

The South Korea government's tacit policy for quite a while has been to to soft pedal reunification because they know exactly how hard it would be and don't think they have the resources to deal with it.

They definitely don't want outsiders coming in and breaking things again.

Gremlin wrote:

The South Korea government's tacit policy for quite a while has been to to soft pedal reunification because they know exactly how hard it would be and don't think they have the resources to deal with it.

They definitely don't want outsiders coming in and breaking things again.

I feel that.

Omarosa claims she tried to bring some stability to the White House.

Bwahahahaha. Hey look--reality TV star does a reality TV star thing.

All the recent Omarosa stuff screams of her just trying to maximize her own image in the aftermath of her time in the admin. I finally saw the clip of the Big Brother quote, and man, it looks 1000% insincere and staged, either by her, by the producers, or both.

It's a well-handled bit of publicity management from someone who's proven she knows how to play the game. It's a terrible talent, but she's doing it well.

California police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue 'anti-racist' activists, documents show: Officers expressed sympathy with white supremacists and sought their help to target counter protesters after a violent 2016 rally, according to court documents

California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with “anti-racist” beliefs, court documents show.

The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.

Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.

Gremlin wrote:

California police worked with neo-Nazis to pursue 'anti-racist' activists, documents show: Officers expressed sympathy with white supremacists and sought their help to target counter protesters after a violent 2016 rally, according to court documents

California police investigating a violent white nationalist event worked with white supremacists in an effort to identify counter protesters and sought the prosecution of activists with “anti-racist” beliefs, court documents show.

The records, which also showed officers expressing sympathy with white supremacists and trying to protect a neo-Nazi organizer’s identity, were included in a court briefing from three anti-fascist activists who were charged with felonies after protesting at a Sacramento rally. The defendants were urging a judge to dismiss their case and accused California police and prosecutors of a “cover-up and collusion with the fascists”.

Defense lawyers said the case at the state capital offers the latest example of US law enforcement appearing to align with neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups while targeting anti-fascist activists and Donald Trump protesters after violent clashes.

Infiltration has been a deliberate strategy for nazi groups from about 40 years now. I'm not particularly surprised it's working.