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[Lord Shonus]

In perhaps the most alarming of Trump's tweets, he proposed stripping away the broadcast licenses of news companies that criticism him.

While this is effectively an empty threat because it is beyond his power, it is still extremely dangerous.

[Egan_BW]

Hey, at least if everything criticizing Trump gets censored, we can stop arguing about what is or isn't a first amendment breach because there will be no more first amendment.

[Max™]

Welp: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/11/federal-data-collection-in-crisis-000537

[Reelya]

Trump will wave the first amendment around and say it's just a bunch of paper, like Bush did with medicare's obligations.

3. Trump claims that the stock market rally -- sorry, HIS stock market rally -- has possibly wiped out the national debt, thus failing economics forever.

I'd love to find out how the heck he reached that conclusion.....

It doesn't even make sense from the naive "government as a business" model. e.g. if the government is a business, then the nation's stock market represents your customers. And it makes no sense to say "well our customers are getting richer so the company hemmoraging money doesn't matter".

[MrRoboto75]

And it makes no sense to say "well our customers are getting richer so the company hemmoraging money doesn't matter".

This is Donald Trump, who will run his ventures straight into bankruptcy for his own personal benefit.

[birdy51]

His antics make me wonder about the logistics of non-disclosure agreements. We hear about them a lot in regards to Trump, but how do they work exactly?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

For the people in his history you'd likely see two kinds of NDA: settlement and employment. The former for people who sued Trump and settled out of court, the latter for people who worked for him in sensitive areas.

The employment NDAs are likely very simple: you don't talk about Trump or his business to the media or anybody not also employed by Trump, ever. If you violate that agreement you are fired and automatically consent to be prosecuted for breach of contract. These agreements likely have no expiration clause but probably undergo some decay in the eyes of the law if you've long abandoned working for Trump, a person can't be compelled to give up their rights in perpetuity.

The settlement NDAs are more likely to be balanced: Trump pays the agreed upon settlement in the manner specified, and in exchange the injured party shuts the fuck up forever about the subject of the suit. If Trump should fail to provide the settlement in full the NDA evaporates and the injured party keeps whatever they've gotten already. If he does, the NDA lasts in perpetuity.

That's my layman's perspective anyway, a lot of this stuff I'm sure is mutable, but my understanding is that these are the normal versions of NDAs.

[EnigmaticHat]

You sign an agreement with an employer to not reveal some category of information.  If you break the agreement, your employer can take you to court for damages (or fire you, at which point you could take them to court).  Just because you signed an agreement with your employer doesn't automatically mean it will hold up in court, but that's beyond my understanding.

US government confidentiality isn't the same thing as a non-disclosure agreement.  Breaking a non-disclosure agreement isn't a crime, merely grounds for a lawsuit.  If you have a security clearance and you knowingly leak information, AFAIK that's a federal crime.  But beyond that I couldn't tell you much.  Unless your name rhymes with Bedward Blowden, the penalties for leaking information seem inconsistent and not that harsh.

[Trekkin]

Unless your name rhymes with Bedward Blowden, the penalties for leaking information seem inconsistent and not that harsh.

That's for a number of reasons. For one, there is no single law covering the release of classified information; there's different laws for things like atomic secrets and sources and methods, with treason as a sort of catchall.

For another, and probably the cause of the first, the US loves to classify information first and ask need-to-know questions later, regardless of how relevant to national defense it actually is; we have decades upon decades of worthless "secrets" gathering dust with no real rhyme, reason, or review, and most of them are illegally classified anyway since no one with the clearance to read them has any impetus to reveal them as such. It makes Senators feel good to have stuff they read marked tippity-top double-super-secret and it gives all our spies something to do (and a way to conjure phantom almost-attacks to justify their outrageous abuses of personal liberty), but most of it could only provide aid or comfort to an enemy by remedying their insomnia.

And, of course, making a big deal about a particular piece of information would also encourage people to go look at it.

So, taken together, there's not a lot of motivation to actually pull apart a given leak and show a jury what exactly was released and why it's harmful, because chances are good it shouldn't have been classified in the first place, let alone that it was properly classified under the aegis of one of our patchwork of anti-espionage acts.

[RedKing]

2. The Weinstein scandal continues to explode, turning Hollywood into "Who Hasn't Been Groped By A Millionaire?". The alt-right take on it? 'Of course this is no surprise...he's a Jew'

Mark Oppenheimer is a Jewish reporter whose specialty is reporting for a Jewish audience. Tablet mag itself, well:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Don't you just love it when people form hatemobs to target jews for being nazis. Antifa YES
[internal, external screaming, lots of screaming]

Fair enough, though the article's being touted by Richard Spencer, and praised on Stormfront.

Welp: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/11/federal-data-collection-in-crisis-000537

Data = facts, and facts are annoying, unnecessary things in the post-factual world we live in.

If I wanted to be a bit more conspiracy-minded, I'd argue it's because Republicans are well aware that demographic shifts are stacked against them. What better way to combat that than by making sure you don't record those demographics? Of course, that might backfire given that the first casualties might be rural areas because they're harder and costlier to survey.

[redwallzyl]

Welp: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/11/federal-data-collection-in-crisis-000537

Data = facts, and facts are annoying, unnecessary things in the post-factual world we live in.

If I wanted to be a bit more conspiracy-minded, I'd argue it's because Republicans are well aware that demographic shifts are stacked against them. What better way to combat that than by making sure you don't record those demographics? Of course, that might backfire given that the first casualties might be rural areas because they're harder and costlier to survey.

And people wonder why I think the national republican party is pure cancer slowly killing the country.

[martinuzz]

Damn, those fires in California are turning out to be as big a distaster as the hurricanes. Just saw some videos on dutch national 8 oçlock news, looks like some villages or towns were completely burned to the ground there. Horrible. Stay safe, Californian forumites.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/11/killer-wildfires-continue-to-scorch-californias-wine-country-with-21-dead-and-hundreds-missing/

EDIT: what does amaze me, is that judging by the debris, a lot of houses in the area are built of wood, with no to barely any stones used.
Were those all old houses, or does the US not have fire safety regulations for residential construction?

[misko27]

I would assume that if any place had it, it would be the west.

[Lord Shonus]

There are extensive regulations on fire safety for construction, primarily concerning electrical wiring, insulation, and egress options. As any major fire will gut a stone building as easily as a wooden one, no fire code prohibits wooden construction.

[MrRoboto75]

Its more along the lines of the building shouldn't combust from any sort of internal malfunction.  External sources of fire are another story.