Everyone seems to think it's about maximizing his ROI or, less cynical, about economics. But here's a quote from Thiel's speech at the republican convention:
"Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don't need to see Hillary Clinton's deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya, and today it's a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It's time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country."
He clearly says "On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right" and it's not really surprising, since Thiel is a libertarian.
Clinton's plan for Syria is scary. Ironically it displays the kind of toughness that Trump claims to represent. Personally I think it is a bad move, and Russia has already been reasonable, e.g. backing the Iran deal.
You don't even need to be a libertarian or an isolationist to believe that the neoconservative approach is wrong.
This is the only issue that really worries me, Clinton might actually attempt to get some leverage over Russia as she says. In such a bold move, Russia will feel so cornered that it may break out into a major war, with possible use of limited nuclear weapons.
The western world doesn't understand the mentality of Russia, they have had two regime collapses this century already. Putin believes that everything needs to be done to avoid a third one.
I'm not even in the US, but have been following the election closely. What a circus, both candidates are horrible choices. But Clinton's foreign policy is what scares me, at least based on what I have heard so far.
Another concern is some type of civil unrest after the election.
This is how Japan was pushed into WWII, and how China right now is being pushed in arming up.
Quick history lesson:
China, basically dominated the world, even when the world weren't aware of China's existence for most of the history, then when England and US came knocking into China's door, they managed to force China into a mix of submission, collapse and opening.
Then US tried to repeat the feat with Japan, starting with the infamous "black ships" (how the japanese called the mysterious US warships when japan still used wooden ships).
Japan then started a serious attempt to avoiding "being the new China", and started to literally imitate US and Europe: invade everywhere, and attempt to become a colonizing superpower.
This in the end is the reason why Japan ended in WWII.
Russia saw what happened to countries around them, Iraq was literally created by England, with borders intentionally crappy to create internal problems (Lawrence of Arabia publicy proposed this), US and Europe actions in Japan and Korea region basically turned Japan and Korea into virtual US colonies, in fact, Japan plans I mentioned earlier failed, badly, Japan DID became a "new China" that must obey US interests, and instead of "black ships" at their ports, ended with a permanent base in their territory.
Not only to Putin, but to the russian population, stuff like trying to sanction Russia, is viewed as an strongarm attempt to pull Russia into submission, to the russian population, the fact that they are becoming poorer due to US sanctions, and US allies oil-price meddling, isn't a reason to become angry at Putin, to them it is reason to consider US the ultimate enemies, and do their best to support Putin no matter what happens.
US, England and France seemly doesn't understand that after 2 centuries meddling in Asia in a imperialistic manner, one country that always has been very imperial themselves, will see them as a major threat and will never, ever, back down.
To Russia, nuclear war is more desirable than "slavery", it is better to die, than to submit.
(this is not even counting yet the psychological effects of Russia terrain... Russia geography is so fucked-up that only people that are mentally resilient and willing to endure famine, poverty and extreme situations will live there)
I wish the press would call her out on using the term "leverage". If the US military confront Russia's proxies at the no-fly-zone and force them to turn back, then this would given them leverage against Russia. That's what the term implies. Changing that situation on the ground and then going to Russia and saying "now what". When Clinton uses the term "leverage" it's misleading voters, who don't realize that enforcing the no-fly-zone will require confronting Russian planes directly.
This is what worries me, especially given the state of both the mainstream press and feminism right now. Here in the UK, we've already seen the leader of the opposition accused of supporting harassment and violence against women for opposing bombing Syria merely because some of pro-bombing MPs that had anti-war protests outside their offices were female. Imagine what will happen once the President of the US is a hawkish, well-connected Democrat woman who can defend a man accused of brutally raping a 12 year old girl, leaving her with massive internal injuries, by convincing the court to put the girl through a forced psychiatric examination so nasty she refused to testify afterwards using an expert witness who argued that little girls fantasise and lie about sex with older men all the time - and have the press spin this a feminist act that only right-wing propagandists could object to. We're doomed.
This is a very real problem for Trump. Trump has already been forced to change his rhetoric on Israel, and even Pence doesn't support Trump's plan for Syria (letting Russia/Assad win).
On the other hand, Trump has a huge amount of support for him personally that hasn't been seen before, so maybe he can leverage this against the neocons in his own party.
Basically, I believe the best government is a local authoritarian government, where variables are known, and the ruler is close to the population, for example Singapore.
When you go stupid-big sized countries (like US, Brazil, Russia...), you have a problem: these countries have too much land and populations to manage efficiently.
In those cases, the ideal solution would be a libertarian FEDERAL government, while local governments (municipalities and states) can do "whatever" they want as long it doesn't put national security in danger.
That said, there are some authoritarian rules, that if applied to the whole country, aren't 100% bad, they are not ideal, but it might work, for example avoiding war, encouraging reproduction (specially among the elites), protecting your economy from external threats, reducing the economy internal mess (subsidies specially are problematic), and so on.
> Hasn't Thiel talked about how it's bad that women have the right to vote?
I was curious about this, so I looked it up. From Thiel's writings on Cato Unbound:
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Later:
> It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.
I'm not quite sure what he's trying to say. It sounds more like nonsense than any sort of actionable malice to me. (But then again, I don't really care about Thiel in the first place, so maybe I'm a little biased.)
He's saying he doesn't want to disenfranchise women or any particular class, he wants to disenfranchise everybody. He's framing the democratic political process as something that doesn't get anywhere and something that gets in the way of progress, so he prefers authoritarian power over the checks and balances of a democratic political system.
He was trying to deflect the criticism from his controversial essay, so his only option was to be obsequiously vague in his wording while killing the strawman of "Thiel wanting to take away women's right to vote".
>No sense in doing complicated mental gymnastics here.
Yeah, it's such a hassle trying to understand people who hold different opinions from yours. And reading their own words? Bor-ing! Better to just vaguely handwave some half-remembered boo-words you read in Vox and call it a day.
I build companies and I support people who are building new things, from social networks to rocket ships.
I'm not a politician.
But neither is Donald Trump.
He is a builder, and it's time to rebuild America.
Where I work in Silicon Valley, it's hard to see where America has gone wrong.
My industry has made a lot of progress in computers and in software, and, of course, it's made a lot of money.
But Silicon Valley is a small place.
Drive out to Sacramento, or even across the bridge to Oakland, and you won't see the same prosperity. That's just how small it is.
Across the country, wages are flat.
Americans get paid less today than 10 years ago. But healthcare and college tuition cost more every year. Meanwhile Wall Street bankers inflate bubbles in everything from government bonds to Hillary Clinton's speaking fees.
Our economy is broken. If you're watching me right now, you understand this better than any politician in Washington. And you know this isn't the dream we looked forward to. Back when my parents came to America looking for that dream, they found it—right here in Cleveland.
They brought me here as a one-year-old, and this is where I became an American.
Opportunity was everywhere.
My Dad studied engineering at Case Western Reserve University, just down the road from where we are now. Because in 1968, the world's high tech capital wasn't just one city: all of America was high tech.
It's hard to remember this, but our government was once high tech, too. When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the Internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon—and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio.
The future felt limitless.
But today our government is broken. Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can't even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government's software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn't even work at all.
That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan Project. We don't accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government.
Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don't need to see Hillary Clinton's deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya, and today it's a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It's time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country.
When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom.
This is a distraction from our real problems. Who cares?
Of course, every American has a unique identity.
I am proud to be gay.
I am proud to be a Republican.
But most of all I am proud to be an American.
I don't pretend to agree with every plank in our party's platform. But fake culture wars only distract us from our economic decline.
And nobody in this race is being honest about it except Donald Trump.
While it is fitting to talk about who we are, today it's even more important to remember where we came from. For me that is Cleveland, and the bright future it promised.
When Donald Trump asks us to Make America Great Again, he's not suggesting a return to the past. He's running to lead us back to that bright future.
Tonight I urge all of my fellow Americans to stand up and vote for Donald Trump.
This speech, distilled: New Deal good, wars in the Middle East bad, LGBT rights for all. It's not clear to me how this is an endorsement of Trump or the Republican party.
When people hear ambiguous things that make them happy, they often imagine that whoever they deem the hero at the moment agrees with them on everything and would do exactly what they would do, regardless of what the truth might be.
It works, but it's very fragile. A lot of our military tech is fragile. We have many dependencies on systems that are no longer (physically) produced outside DoD demand, which puts the prices into the exorbitant range.
Modernization efforts are error-prone and only bandaids in many cases.
And new efforts have seen production and development issues that are just embarrassing (F-35).
I understand the "if it works, it works"[1] argument, but I also get the despair in it too. We used to be leaders in advanced technologies, now we're not lagging but not leading in advanced technologies in the very visible "great society" ways. The mission and the hope that technology could deliver.
[1] Taking this too far let's us say horses and oxen "worked" at tilling fields --but very few people would argue modern agricultural machinery is superfluous.
Mailgun has a great inbound api [1]. You can set up routing rules to let them post the email as json (or just forward it) to a specified url. The json also includes fields for the extracted quoted parts and signature. The latter is based on some machine learning, which other providers don't have afaik.
I would second Mailgun for inbound email. Granted, my use-case is very low-volume, but it works great and the email parsing seems to be pretty good.
I've previously used Mandrill for inbound, which has a lot of problems that I'd rather not enumerate. But that was at a much higher scale, so many of those problems I wouldn't have seen yet even if Mailgun has them.
Ooooh, that would be pretty handy. I've been relying on good old "please reply above this line" to parse inbound emails, precisely because I didn't want to muck around with ML to infer user intent (I reeeeally wish quotes, the reply-date separator, and signature blocks were standardized somehow). If there's a reliable improvement to this functionality provided by my email service, that's 100% a feature I'm willing to pay for. Thanks.
Do posts from signalvsnoise.com get a penalty or are they just always flagged? I'm asking cause this was just posted an hour ago, has 157 points/47 comments, and is already falling from the first page. And this seems like a pattern.
> We also recognize that not all inboxes are alike. So while your neighbor may love weekly email newsletters, you may loathe them. With advances in machine learning, the spam filter can now reflect these individual preferences.
I really wonder how these preferences are reflected if someone hasn't been using spam filters much. I get maybe at most a dozen spam emails escaped a year, and the rest of the emails go through (all mailing lists... I am on a lot of mailing lists) so I get about 50+ emails per day from just DL. So I barely ever need to mark something as spam, or even more something to another folder, so how does Google know what's my preference? It sounds like people who don't actively mark spams are less likely affected...
From looking at that, it appears to be a set of tools that high-volume senders of email can use to help ensure they don't get incorrectly flagged as spam. It seems to do nothing to help high-volume receivers of email.
It tells you nothing about their self esteem, it's about offering products people want to buy. Does selling Microsoft Office for OS X show a lack of esteem? (Hint: the basic Office programs appeared first on the Mac.)
In any case, Microsoft already launched a Universal Bluetooth Keyboard (works with Windows, Android, iOS) last year. It would be a surprise if they went backwards from that.
They guy who is marketing this keyboard is responsible for selling keyboards, so he lists them in the order of likelihood that the reader owns one. Speaking exactly, only 71 people on Earth actually have Windows tablets, so mentioning them first would only serve to make the author seem like a corporate toolbag of the highest order.
"Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East. We don't need to see Hillary Clinton's deleted emails: her incompetence is in plain sight. She pushed for a war in Libya, and today it's a training ground for ISIS. On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right. It's time to end the era of stupid wars and rebuild our country."
He clearly says "On this most important issue, Donald Trump is right" and it's not really surprising, since Thiel is a libertarian.