Yeah but Sanders is just a career politician who wouldn't know how to lead an organization or get serious policy implemented at gunpoint. Russia had to basically run his Facebook ads for him just to get any traction lol.

On the other hand, Yang's built a fortune and organization in a fraction of the amount of time Sanders has served. He's a long shot for 2020 but he's the only candidate I've seen who could bring about real change.

Amazon was already planning on increasing wages by Q4 last year though: hiring had slowed down and they needed to incentivize in order to reach a larger labor pool. I'll give Sanders credit for timing though: sometimes picking a fight can be good PR if you line up the right optics.

1. Depends on how the fortune was built. Speaking from personal experience: there is nothing more challenging that scaling an organization without potentially wrecking it. The fact someone can pull that off tells me more about a person's capabilities than someone who sits in Washington for decades and votes A or B. The dude is so out of touch that Russia (and possibly China) ended up using him as a wedge to weaken the Democratic Party. His heart's in the right place, but I think if he had the ability to build an organization he would have demonstrated it decades ago.

2. The effectiveness of the President as a leader depends on their background. We need more specialists willing to aspire to that office, not more of what we've had throughout the 20th and 21st century so far. Trump, for example, is arguably ****ty in most respects as a businessman and human being (unlike Yang), but his approach to China has been far more effective than anything previous administrations have come up with. If you look at the geopolitical long-game at least. The fact that he can get any results at all despite all of his weaknesses tells me that there's value to having a POTUS who doesn't have a political background and comes from some other walk of life.

A bigger concern I have is that Sanders appears to have an even weaker grasp on economics than Trump does (as his comments on health care have shown): I have zero confidence in his ability to position the U.S. to adapt to coming changes in tech, automation, etc, as well as being able to respond to whatever China ends up doing.

The ideal leader for the Democratic Party is somebody who actually has the capabilities to grasp the real problems we are facing and how we might combat them. Biden, Sanders, and Warren are not those people: they're all career politicians with zero technical ability. Give me a POTUS who did something like architecting software, or someone with an engineering background....just anything other than another lawyer or former mayor/senator/governor.

It's okay to bait people that the mods find to be despicable. These wonderful and lovely mods that I do adore an awful lot.

A certain orange-faced leader of the free world has Sanders beaten in that department methinks.

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...ivpud7sed3DTVu

i guess i was just too young to fully comprehend the implications when the peepee tape surfaced.

My friend said that he kind of regrets watching it because he can never appreciate R. Kelly's music the same way now.

Has anyone ever said in this thread: "Wow I Can't Believe That News Story"?

Yeah.

Prove it, and it's got to be said exactly like that.

Otherwise I'm suing for false advertising.

this isn't the what are you watching thread?

I'm not digging through this to find that ya lil piece o ****.

Yes it is.

You'll be hearing from my lawyers.

I like to keep up with the news. If I find a news story that I think is important, I save it so that I can share it with others and so that I can look back on it in the future if need be.

I usually compile several worthy links per day.

If I share them one-by-one, the mods will combine my posts into one big jumblefuck, so it behooves me to just post them all in one single post to begin with.

If I share each entire story on its own, replete with text and media, it will take up an entire page, and I will get accused of hijacking the thread.

If I post a list of succinct headlines, letting people read them and choose if they want to click and read further, then I get accused of spamming.

Basically, nothing that I do will ever be good enough, because some people have a personal problem with me and refuse to work it out and bury the hatchet, because it somehow serves them better to proliferate some meaningless hostility than to have peace and unity.

So, I will just continue to post in the way that I think best serves the forum, until someone can show me a better way :beer:

This is getting redundant. Quit defending your posting style if you know they're just being *******s. Sick of reading the same **** over and over.

What's really funny is people getting so upset at Merit for something so innocuous as how he posts news links.

and come on, wheres the post with 'Wow I Can't Believe That News Story', my lawyers and I are waiting.

Upset is the wrong word.

I like when I post something that gets lambasted, then one of them re-posts it, and the lackeys eat it up and praise it.

I know that you don't like me, but your intermittent disdain for their bad behavior hasn't gone unnoticed :beer:

You're so ahead of us that we can't keep up with your pace so it becomes a bit intimidating when we see a large list of links.

Thanks, now my joke is finished.

True, more like infuriated. "How dare you post a link like that!!!!!!!" :banghead::banghead::banghead::banghead:

That used to happen on an old forum I was on in regards to music and without the shit thrown. I'd be like 'check this cool album out guys' and they'd ignore it until some person posted about the same album months later.

I've been keeping a list of important news link just like that since 2013. It's currently 211 pages long.

No, more like he keeps asking why nobody pays attention to his links and this is their answer and the discussion keeps getting dragged out over and over even though nothing new is learned or forms from each time the discussion arises.

It's not like they went out of their way to chew him out for posting like that, they just gave him the honest answer to his question.

I don't care, I don't click links in general. Not unless the discussion around it intrigues me. Staying woke is tiring and I don't like coffee.

I didn't ask elph WHY he didn't acknowledge my earlier posting of his story, I simply pointed out that the story had already been brought up in this thread.

I dunno, I only occasionally look in this thread so I don't know the whole story. I just remember seeing them throw the **** for what the links look like and getting pretty worked up about it.

I should copy and past all 211 pages of my news links.

That's pretty nit picky.

I get that you want credit for being the first to post the news, I just don't get why it matters so much.

Majority of it is trolling if you want to be honest.

^ Yeah, that is flat-out annoying! I think we should all give credit where we can when we are following up on someone else's rec - news items not so much perhaps.

Nothing wrong with [MERIT]'s links in my view. There's no obligation to click on them, but they are there if we want. If not, I have a "scroll" facility and can move on to something else.
__________________________________________________ ___________________________

He believes in transparency of government, but he wants to be the guy deciding if the Mueller Report ever sees the light of day. He aspires to ethical conduct, but demands the personal right to overrule any decision the Ethics Committee makes about his own behaviour. Is anyone else worried about the upcoming Attorney General, Hobo Chang Barr ?

lol Hobo

It's 99% a vicious cycle of people who don't like Merit baiting him and him falling for it, and Lucem's right to say that that dog and pony show of retardation's gotten a bit stale after the 1000th time.

Basically

Well, at least two others (Frown) got this. :D

I think we should all just smoke a joint.

Then get out.

I’ll dig up an obscure boundary bending virtuoso free jazz release. Link to it, post images, explain what’s so great about it - crickets (actually props to Grindy blarob and frown for frequently chiming in) but goddamn if people don’t love a good troll.

https://media.giphy.com/media/14tvbepZ8vhU40/giphy.gif

Ja we should stop talking about how spammy Merit's links look. If he doesn't understand at this point, he never will.

https://media.tenor.co/images/8a4a99...a624/tenor.gif

It’s actually a great time to double down on it.

Or improve your routine.

Again, if you have a better way to succinctly share a dozen links at once in a single post without taking up an entire page of the thread, be my guest.

News story

Here are a couple of thoughts on the story.

X12