President Trump Has the Work Ethic of a Bored, Lazy Child

By Alexander Nazaryan On 7/19/17 at 7:30 AM, Newsweek

Liberals used to grouse about President George W. Bush’s less-than-rigorous work schedule: the long work-outs, the frequent brush-clearing forays at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. He went to bed at 9. What kind of statesman goes to bed at such a grade-school hour?

Those were the days.

On the eve of his presidential inauguration, Donald J. Trump told an audience, “I promise you that I will work so hard.” He’d spent both the primary campaign and the general election comparing his work ethic to that of his opponents, including “low energy” Jeb Bush and stamina-deficient Hillary Clinton.

“I would rarely leave the White House because there’s so much work to be done,” Trump said in the political prehistory that was the summer of 2015. “I would not be a president who took vacations. I would not be a president that takes time off.”

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TRUMP’S APPROVAL RATINGS AFTER SIX MONTHS ARE THE WORST OF ANY PRESIDENT

Date: 17-07-2017
Source: NewsWeek

Trump Says He And Putin ‘Get Along Very, Very Well’

Donald Trump’s approval rating has reached a historic new low in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, with almost half of Americans believing the country to be weaker since he took office.

According to the poll, just 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance as president, down six points from Trump’s 100 days approval rating—which was itself the lowest for any president in polling history at that point.

The only other president whose approval ratings were as poor six months into his tenure was Gerald Ford, whose approval ratings stood at 39 percent in February 1975.

The poll also found that 48 percent of the country thinks America is weaker since Trump took power in January, with only 27 percent believing it to be stronger.

Trump boasted of his deal-making abilities on the campaign trail, but majorities also did not back Trump in negotiations with foreign leaders—in particular Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom Trump met face-to-face for the first time at a recent G20 summit in Germany.

Of those polled, 66 percent said they did not trust the president to effectively represent U.S. interests in negotiations with foreign leaders, with two-thirds also saying they didn’t trust him to do so with Putin.

TRUMPISM IS AN AFFRONT TO WESTERN SOCIETY, NOT ITS SAVIOR

Date: 11-07-2017
Source: NewsWeek

President Trump is right: the West is facing an existential threat. He said so in a speech in Warsaw last Thursday, declaring that the “fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.” The president wondered if “we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it.”

Trump’s speech was written by Stephen Miller, a top White House aide known to traffic in overheated nationalism. Trump’s remarks accordingly singled out the West’s primary enemy: “radical Islamic terrorism,” a verbal construction that holds almost shamanistic powers for the right.

We shouldn’t downplay the threat posed by the Islamic State militant group and its affiliates. Nor should we exaggerate it. The fanatics motivated by a warped interpretation of the Koran will do their best to kill innocents, but so will fanatics who have nothing to do with Islam, mass murderers who take their cue from The Turner Diaries, the Old Testament or the whispers of private demons. More than 8,000 Americans have been killed by guns in 2017. Does that make the gun lobby an enemy of the West?

EMMANUEL MACRON RIVALS TRUMP’S ‚AMERICA FIRST‘ WITH PLAN TO MAKE EUROPE GREAT AGAIN

Date: 16-06-2017
Source: Newsweek

French President Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump don’t have many obvious parallels, although they both enjoy a handshake more than is strictly necessary.

But while Macron’s platform is avowedly liberal both economically and socially, his plans for European trade have a distinctly protectionist flavor. You might even say he wants to “make Europe great again” and “put Europe first.” Or something.

More than a third of French voters backed the hard-right, Euroskeptic protectionism of Marine Le Pen in the recent election. Elsewhere in Europe, parties who want to close borders and stop globalization have surged in recent years. Macron is seeking a pro-European response to this movement, or, as he put it in his presidential manifesto, a Europe that “concentrates on major challenges and dares to defend its interests and values in the world.”

CLIMATE PACT PULLOUT REVEALS TRUMP’S TRUE BASE

Date: 02-06-2017
Source: Newsweek

Donald Trump Announces Withdrawal From Paris Climate Accord: ‚We’re Getting Out‘

They came from Exxon Mobil, Apple, Unilever. Titans of industry. They begged. They pleaded. They cajoled and threatened: Elon Musk said he would quit advising the Donald Trump. As late as Wednesday night, Ivanka and Jared’s friends were still laying out a Hail Mary pass scenario in which the president would stay in the Paris climate pact at the last minute and give all the persuasion credit to the first son-in-law, thereby perhaps placating the investigatory hounds from hell on the young man’s trail.

In the end, the titan’s pleas, Ivanka and Jared’s social future in Manhattan and the future of the planet mattered far, far less than Trump’s base. His real base. Not the coal miners or oil drilling roughnecks or even the evangelicals, who think if the world is melting, well, God Will Sort It Out.

Casual Trump watchers still believe that he’s pulling out of the climate pact because he shares with those low-information groups the notion that climate science is a Chinese hoax—and/or that he doesn’t really believe that but is cannily playing to the blue-collar, black-fingernailed coal mining and resource-extractor roughneck community that supposedly helped put him in office. 

STEPHEN HAWKING: WE NEED TO FIND NEW PLANETS TO LIVE ON

Date: 20-05-2017
Source: NewsWeek

Stephen Hawking has said our time on Earth is running out and we must start searching for new planets to live on if we are to survive as a species.

The physicist recently warned that we only have 100 years to leave Earth and start inhabiting other planets in the universe—or face the possibility of going extinct.

Speaking Friday at the Royal Society in London, U.K., Hawking elaborated on his somewhat dire forecast. “I am aware there is a good deal of speculation in the media at the moment regarding my prediction of our time left on this Earth,” he said.

HOW LONG UNTIL FACEBOOK TAKES OVER THE WORLD?

Date: 10-05-2017
Source: NewsWeek

Facebook Doubles Down On Social VR With Spaces—Now in Beta!

At some point soon, possibly even in May, the number of people in the world using Facebook is going to top 2 billion. That will mean more than half of all internet users in the world are on Mark Zuckerberg’s 13-year-old social network.

In its first quarterly earnings report for 2017 on Wednesday, Facebook stated that it had 1.94 billion monthly active users—300 million more than it had at the same time last year. According to the web-monitoring website Internet Live Stats, there are more than 3.6 billion internet users in the world—around 200 million more than there were last year. Facebook is on its way to signing them up.

Speaking after the quarterly results were announced, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke of the company’s size but did not make explicit his plans for keeping up this astonishing rate of growth. “With that foundation our next focus will be building community,” Zuckerberg said. “There’s a lot to do there.”

The word “community” only hints at his ambitions. Several initiatives the social network has launched in recent years point to his plan to connect the entire world to the internet—and by extension, to Facebook.

Some attempts, like the solar-powered internet planes it tested in Arizona last July, have had some success yet remain a long way from being realized on any significant scale. Other attempts, such as its Free Basics program in India have failed entirely—Indian regulators shut the project down in February over concerns about the social network’s potential to threaten net neutrality.

On Thursday, the technology juggernaut announced the commercial launch of “Express Wi-Fi,” which it claims will give millions of Indians access to the web at an “affordable” fee. It is designed to allow people to pay for the internet directly from local service providers and according to its website is live in Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania and Indonesia as well as India. The initiative forms part of facebook’s Internet.org project, which launched in 2013 with the stated ambition of connecting the two-thirds of the planet without internet access.

Some activists have criticized Internet.org for the underlying implications of what is arguably Zuckerberg’s most ambitious project.

“We shouldn’t celebrate Facebook’s efforts to ‘bring the internet to all’ because that is not what they are doing,” transparency advocate David Sasaki said in a blogpost published shortly after the unveiling of Internet.org.

RICH AMERICANS LIVE 15 YEARS LONGER THAN POOR

Date: 08-04-2017
Source: NewsWeek

Wealth and health are intrinsically linked in the United States, with rich Americans living between 10 to 15 years longer than their poor counterparts, a study has found.

A series of five papers published in the medical journal The Lancet found that a widening income gap, structural racism and mass incarceration are fueling growing health inequalities.

“The USA is one of the richest countries in the world, but that reality means very little for most people because so much of that wealth is controlled by a tiny sliver of Americans,” U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders wrote in an article introducing the research.

Sanders called for reforms to the healthcare system, which he described as “the most expensive, bureaucratic, wasteful, and ineffective” in the world.

HOW GEERT WILDERS LOST POWER BUT GAINED INFLUENCE IN THE NETHERLANDS

Date: 18-03-2017
Source: NewsWeek

Populists helped move the nation’s mainstream parties to the right and transformed political norms despite falling short at the polls.

Dutch PM Mark Rutte wins election: Netherlands says no to ‘wrong kind of populism‘

As results flooded in after the Dutch general election, incumbent Prime Minister Mark Rutte was beaming.

The country, he said, had hit back against far-right, anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders and the hate he espoused. Wilders’s Party for Freedom came a distant second, with 20 seats, to Rutte’s People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, which won 33. “The Netherlands said: ‘Whoa!’ to the wrong kind of populism,” Rutte told supporters at a rally. Headlines proclaimed that, despite the nativist insurgencies of 2016, the Dutch had rallied in support of the liberal center.

But the truth is not that simple. Wilders is out of power, but his influence is everywhere. He has shown how populists can transform political norms, even when they lose. Rutte’s party responded to rising populism in the Netherlands by toughening its stance on immigration. Case in point: During the campaign, Rutte took out an ad in a Dutch paper that urged migrants in the Netherlands to “be normal or go away.”

GOLDMAN SACKED: HOW ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE WILL TRANSFORM WALL STREET

Date: 27-02-2017
Source: NewsWeek
High-earning traders will quickly become an endangered species as AI takes over the financial sector.

Will The Wolves Of Wall Street Be Out Of A Job Soon?
For the past year, we as a society have been worried sick about artificial intelligence eating the jobs of 3 million truck drivers. Turns out that a more imminently endangered species are the Wall Street traders and hedge fund managers who can afford to buy Lamborghinis and hire Elton John to play their Hamptons house parties.

So maybe “hooray for AI” on this one?

Financial giants such as Goldman Sachs and many of the biggest hedge funds are all switching on AI-driven systems that can foresee market trends and make trades better than humans. It’s been happening, drip by drip, for years, but a torrent of AI is about to wash through the industry, says Mark Minevich, a New York-based investor in AI and senior adviser to the U.S. Council on Competitiveness. High-earning traders are going to get unceremoniously dumped like workers at a closing factory.

“It will really hit at the soul of Wall Street,” Minevich tells me. “It will transform New York.”