Three of the four major candidates for United States president have responded to America's Top 20 Presidential Science, Engineering, Technology, Health and Environmental Questions. The nonprofit advocacy group ScienceDebate.org has posted their responses online. Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jill Stein had all responded as of press time, and the group was awaiting responses from Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday September 14 2016, @05:36PM
BAU politics is 100% smiley happy face and you propose stuff by tossing out nebulous unachievable goals plus or minus content free sophistry. People generally hate it.
Trump style leadership is business leadership. Business is at least 50% talking tough and threatening not just smiling. So Trump does his usual thing and people expecting a speech about skittles candy flying out of a unicorns butt get all confused and freaked. Businessmen propose stuff by tossing out the most ridiculous possible negotiation point they can imagine. Wait wait you're not supposed to specify how they're gonna pay for a border wall in detail with a valid budget, politicians are supposed to talk about how we're all citizens of earth and have to get along while protecting our borders from terrorism by leaving them wide open or some such literal doublespeak style nonsense.
So imagine leader Hillary and leader Trump are in charge of a famous space rocket company who two failures ago had an outsourced liquid oxygen / helium tank support strut snap in midair leading to a rather impressive midair explosion.
Now lets imagine the Hillary response. Well I have a detailed plan to fix the fuel tank strut weakness problem which includes increasing taxes to hire more FAA regulators, getting rid of all the white people in rocket science and encouraging more people of color to become rocket scientists because I hate white people and that message sells well to my segment of the electorate, I'm gonna make the strut 1/3 lighter and manufacture it completely out of organic hemp seed and natural soy oil, and finally we're going to take down the American flag at the assembly plant and replace with the communist party flag and/or the UN flag because everyone loves gloablism. All very specific and sound bite compatible and said with a smile and pretty much the kind of idiocy you'd expect from a politician.
Now lets imagine the Trump response. OK as super-CEO I'm trying to prioritize this and I will try to squeeze a little more money from finance to tide us over the interval before next flight and I've talked to legal and I think we're OK and I'm going to keep a fire lit under the VP of engineering until they figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, or I'll fire the whole department top to bottom and hire new people who can figure it out. Meanwhile as a negotiation point how about I start with asking the failed strut mfgr for ... 100 billion dollars. Either that or I build a wall around their building. That seems a nice place to start negotiations. I mean, how does a dying legacy news media even report something business-like such as that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:38PM
Paying for the border wall will be easy. Just tell pres Nieto all U.S. aid to mexico will be paying for the wall if they don't build it. And perhaps tax imports and close loopholes for businesses using mexico for manufacturing. It's not that hard to think of a solution.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @07:29PM
Perhaps stop crap like this... Ford moving all production of small cars from U.S. to Mexico http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/09/14/ford-moving-all-production-small-cars-mexico/90354334/ [usatoday.com]
(Score: 2) by PocketSizeSUn on Wednesday September 14 2016, @08:28PM
Why else was he was so upset after his meeting with Trump?
Seems logical to me that you hit the nail on the head there.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 15 2016, @12:01AM
Paying for the border wall will be easy. Just tell pres Nieto all U.S. aid to mexico will be paying for the wall if they don't build it. And perhaps tax imports and close loopholes for businesses using mexico for manufacturing. It's not that hard to think of a solution.
Foreign aid to Mexico (US$417,000,000) [google.com] constitutes approximately .0003% of Mexico's GDP (US$1.144,330,000,000) [tradingeconomics.com]. What's more, given that according to Donald Trump, US$24,800,000,000 in remittances come to Mexico from the US [politifact.com] US Foreign aid to Mexico is ~1.6% of that.
As such, I imagine that the Mexicans aren't all that dependent on US foreign aid.
As for tariffs and taxes, starting a trade war with Mexico would be highly detrimental to the US (admittedly, not as much as to Mexico) and would face stiff opposition from a broad range of interests, not to mention that it would place upward impact on the prices of all manner of good sold in the US. According to the Congressional Research Service [fas.org]:
So that's not such a good idea either.
That really sucks, doesn't it? I guess that makes me a huge asshole for ruining a perfectly good rant with facts. Shame on me!
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 15 2016, @04:33PM
I know one thing for sure... Since Ford is sending all of their car manufacturing to Mexico, putting more American workers out to pasture, it's going to piss off a lot of people. Plus... Even though Fords are already a pile of shit, they're going to be an even bigger pile of shit. Not to mention they'll probably use manure as seat filler.