Hello Don, got a new tax cut? Trump continued

[PerkingFaintly]

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3035639-Is-he-Right-Left-or-is-He-Nothing-at-All-Trump-thread-continued?pg=1

Nice work if you can get it.

Watch: Sarah Huckabee Sanders callously laughs at women who will lose their birth control

shareblue.com/watch-sarah-huckabee-sanders-callously-laughs-at-women-who-will-lose-their-birth-control/

For Friday night and sprained eyes.

Sanders' response is horrifying.
Thanks for the lion

Nate moving towards New Orleans area.

Tropical Storm Nate Moves Toward the Gulf Coast; NOLA Mayor Orders Evacuations, Curfew
weather.com/amp/storms/hurricane/news/tropical-storm-hurricane-nate-impacts-gulf-coast.html

Nate moving towards New Orleans area.

I'm not a religious person, but it really feels like the Almighty is giving Trump enough rope to hang himself. His leadership skills (or lack thereof) have been extensively tested these last few weeks.

Sarah Sanders: "The president is the one that's keeping the world from chaos"

That brings to mind another precious pic I’ve been saving.

Don’t thank me all at once.

Naughty Claws! That's going to give me nightmares.

That is really horrid. How could you Claws?

Yes.

Thanks, Pain. As I said upthread, sooner rather than later, I reckon.

I frequent very arty Internet sites, as you can see. Sorry! (Not really)

Inflicting something like that on us claws when I’m sporting an eye injury

Not looking good with Nate

The Associated Press
The Associated Press @AP
BREAKING: Hurricane Nate forms as it heads toward central Gulf of Mexico packing maximum sustained winds of up to 80 mph.

Sorry, missed half of it off! ...when I’m sporting an eye injury and so can’t avert them as fast as I’d like!

@AriMelber
New: Republican employees of Facebook and Google “embedded” inside Trump’s 2016 Campaign to help, claims @parscale to @LesleyRStahl

Horribly, I think that pic really does represent the far right "Trumpism" programme. Ugh.

Kyle Griffin @kylegriffin1
An hour before Tillerson was confirmed, a rule in Dodd-Frank that Exxon had lobbied against for years was rescinded.

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/16/rex-tillerson-at-the-breaking-point/amp

North Korea plans to test missile it thinks can reach US west coast, Russian official says

Lawmaker who visited country says Pyongyang provided calculations suggesting missile could reach US, as CIA analyst predicts action on 10 October

amp.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/06/north-korea-missile-test-us-west-coast

From the Tillerson article

@NatashaBertrand
Trump "began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas."

In February, a few weeks after Tillerson was confirmed by the Senate, he visited the Oval Office to introduce the President to a potential deputy, but Trump had something else on his mind. He began fulminating about federal laws that prohibit American businesses from bribing officials overseas; the businesses, he said, were being unfairly penalized.

Tillerson disagreed. When he was an executive with Exxon, he told Trump, he once met with senior officials in Yemen to discuss a deal. At the meeting, Yemen’s oil minister handed him his business card. On the back was written an account number at a Swiss bank. “Five million dollars,” the minister told him.

“I don’t do that,” Tillerson said. “Exxon doesn’t do that.” If the Yemenis wanted Exxon on the deal, he said, they’d have to play straight. A month later, the Yemenis assented. “Tillerson told Trump that America didn’t need to pay bribes—that we could bring the world up to our own standards,” a source with knowledge of the exchange told me.

Susan Hennessey
Susan Hennessey @Susan_Hennessey
Trump opposes the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, preventing US companies from foreign bribes. Definitely, no red flags there. No, sir.

Yes, that Secrets of Silicon Valley programme covered the Facebook (and I think Google) presence in detail.

A former member of the Trump Campaign showed the journalist round the office the campaign had used: "The Facebook [and Google] people sat here. Cambridge Analytica sat here..."

Facebook policy director Simon Milner was asked about it a couple of months back, and said that staff had been embedded with the campaign "to help them get the most out of Facebook's capabilities", or words to that effect. IIRC, he was evasive when pressed further.

THis is frightening:

www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/05/smartphone-addiction-silicon-valley-dystopia

Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia

Google, Twitter and Facebook workers who helped make technology so addictive are disconnecting themselves from the internet. Paul Lewis reports on the Silicon Valley refuseniks alarmed by a race for human attention

Excerpt

Since the US election, Williams has explored another dimension to today’s brave new world. If the attention economy erodes our ability to remember, to reason, to make decisions for ourselves – faculties that are essential to self-governance – what hope is there for democracy itself?

“The dynamics of the attention economy are structurally set up to undermine the human will,” he says. “If politics is an expression of our human will, on individual and collective levels, then the attention economy is directly undermining the assumptions that democracy rests on.” If Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat are gradually chipping away at our ability to control our own minds, could there come a point, I ask, at which democracy no longer functions?

“Will we be able to recognise it, if and when it happens?” Williams replies. “And if we can’t, then how do we know it hasn’t happened already?”

And on that note, I’m putting down the phone!

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was also urbane and slippery on his company's activities for the Trump Campaign. He twisted Qs, and although I didn't transcribe the umms and ahhs there was a certain coyness before he actually named FB.

--------
Jamie Bartlett interview of Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, Secrets of Silicon Valley.

Bartlett: I want to start with the Trump campaign. Did Cambridge Analytica ever use psychometric or psychographic methods in this campaign ?

Nix: We left the Cruz campaign in April after the nomination was over. We pivoted right across onto the Trump campaign. It was about five and a half months before polling and whilst on the Cruz campaign we were able to invest a lot more time into building psychographic models, into profiling using behavioural profiling to understand different personality groups and different personality drivers in order to inform out messaging and our creative. We simply didn't have the time to employ this level of rigorous methodology for Trump.

narration: For Cruz, Cambridge Analytica built computer models which could crunch huge amounts of data on each voter, including psychographic data predicting voters' personality types. When the firm transferred to the Trump campaign, they took data with them.

Nix: Now, there is clearly some legacy psychographics in the data because the data is model data, a lot of it's model data that we'd used across the last 14, 15 months of campaigning through the mid-terms and then through the primaries, but specifically did we build specific psychographic models for the Trump campaign, no we didn't.

Bartlett: . So you didn't build specific models for this campaign, but it sounds like you did use some element of psychographic modelling as an approach in the Trump campaign .

Nix: Only, only as a result of legacy data models. So the answer is, the answer you're looking for is no .

Bartlett: . The answer I'm looking for is the extent to which it was used. I mean leg- I don't know what that means, legacy data modelling. What does that mean, for the Trump campaign?

Nix: Well, so we were able to take models that we'd made previously over the last two or three years and integrate those into some of the work we were doing.

narration: Where did all the information to predict voters' personalities come from?

Nix: Very originally, we used a combination of telephone, telephone surveys and then we used a number of online platforms for gathering questions. As we started to gather more data, we started to look at other platforms such as Facebook, for instance.

Big data.

motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/mg9vvn/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

Sorry to hear about pain in the eye, PainInTheEar. You sound... afflicted.

I sound like a right hypochondriac

The ear is fine now and the eye was a rubbish joke about injuring them while rolling them hard at Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I won’t give up the day job

I’ll take flowers wherever I can get them though!