Our Felonious Ex-President

On Friday Mr Trump tweeted that tariffs on $250bn of goods coming into the US were being paid “by China”.

The president argued there was “no need to rush” into a trade agreement with China, as the US Treasury was benefiting from these “massive payments”.

However, in an interview with Fox News Sunday, Mr Kudlow admitted that it was American businesses that paid the tariffs on any goods brought in from China, and that US consumers would also foot the bill if firms passed on the cost increase.

7 Likes

We are getting exactly what people wanted: a President who is running the country EXACTLY as he runs his businesses.

Really, really poorly.

14 Likes

WP claims MAD reached its highest readership in 1974 – if so, we could expect people born after that to know less and less about it.

Similarly, there are people in college now who were born after The Simpsons stopped really being relevant, but they’re not old enough to run for President yet.

7 Likes

I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Pete Buttigieg knows who the “what, me worry kid” is, but he intended his response to rhetorically deflate Trump’s intended insult.

7 Likes

At the risk of appearing to be out of touch.

5 Likes

Yep. “You could have chosen a reference from the last 50 years” would have worked better than “I had to Google that”. The first makes it sound like Trump is out of touch, the second makes it sound like he is.

Reporters get on every candidate for being out of touch, whether it’s Obama eating candy with a knife and fork* or Bush being mystified by a supermarket scanner** or Buttigieg being a homunculus grown in a jar in a top secret lab in Indiana. So why make it easy for them?

*then again, that may have been an episode of Seinfeld.
**it wasn’t an ordinary supermarket scanner, and he wasn’t mystified by it

3 Likes

2008-10-27-wrongonbatman

When I worry about a politician being out of touch, it’s for things like thinking having two jobs is the American dream or that you can just borrow food from the supermarket, but I guess knowing about popular magazines is critical too?

11 Likes

Fine. If you want examples of those things, just read his memoirs.* He is scarily out of touch. He doesn’t need to tee it up for the press.

*quick question: without googling, can you tell me what’s on the cover of his memoirs?

1 Like
12 Likes

Oh FFS. Fine, bigots, go figure out Roman numerals then.

8 Likes

They don’t know what those are either. No foreign numerals!

I see people on Twitter are arguing it’s just the “Arabic” part throwing people off. Sorry, no, of you don’t know where the numeral set used with English comes from, that’s still pathetic.

8 Likes

And, oddly, it’s mostly Republicans who fall into that camp…

8 Likes

The level of stupidity is breathtaking.

6 Likes

Arabic numerals increase the risk of losing or transposing digits, just as Roman numerals increase the risk of losing parts of digits. Hebrew, Greek, Gothic, Slavic, etc. methods are less likely to suffer errors during hand-copying and data entry, and are also used in gematria.

1 Like

I don’t think I’d want to use any of those latter systems. Too much to remember. Using the same symbols as letters can be confusing. Look at the problem with l and 1. Typewriters used to not even have a 1; you had to use the l.

I like our system, especially having a zero. And scientific notation – is that even possible in any of the Hebrew et al. systems?

3 Likes

Yes, you need a special symbol for 0.

The other major difference is that digits are coded for 100s, 10s, 1s, with an overscore for 100,000s, 10,000s, 1,000s. If you use an added symbol for 0, then you can recognize transpositions and deletions much more easily.

I’d suggest using apostrophes instead of overscores, so 1,000,000 = A’’ or A’'000’000. And then you could use commas for decimal values, so 100/1,000 = R00, (the letter for 100 may vary between systems-- that’s probably the weakest point.)

P.S. Some of my ancient gaming research runs into problems with Roman numerals. For example, Vellius Paterculus tried to estimate the number of Spartacist rebels killed. Brent Shaw helpfully remarks “the number in the manuscript is corrupt.” Maybe if the scribes didn’t rely on Roman numerals, the number in the manuscript might have survived. I think we can agree that Roman numerals are among the least resistant to copying errors.

3 Likes
4 Likes

STOP TEACHING OUR CHILDREN PAPIST MATHEMATICS

12 Likes

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48260165

At a press conference, the US president said Mr Orbán was “respected all over Europe” and had “kept [Hungary] safe”.

3 Likes

13 posts were merged into an existing topic: Proposed Rules for good behavior and consequences for misbehavior