So Trump is basicly quitting the Paris climate pact for the mining industry, which is mostly automated? Leaving the solar space for China that going to be the leader in solar energy.
I've actually never thought i would say this, but my "admiration" for the US has drasticly declined the last few months. I think this also affects "Silicon Valley".
PS. Am i right that your President only had a one hit wonder with Trump Tower, with daddy's money. Then licensed everything ( the few things he did with casino's failed). And ... He is now the president, because he was in a TV-show? Or am i missing something?
You're missing about three decades of right-wing propaganda. President Trump is the logical conclusion of The Rush Limbaugh Show, Fox News, and other assorted media.
These people systematically created a tribal political environment where facts don't matter, ridicule is the best argument, and Democrats are the enemy. They've been pounding this into the heads of any American who would listen since the late 1980s or so. Along comes Trump, who is the embodiment of all of these traits, and this extensive groundwork pays off. He's constantly wrong, but his voters have been trained to embrace that. He behaves terribly, but his voters have been trained that this is a good thing as long as the target is the left.
And of course denial of climate change, its negative consequences, and the merits of fighting it are one of the core pillars of this propaganda.
Add in the electoral college, which gives a substantial advantage to candidates who can win rural voters, and here we are.
> Add in the electoral college, which gives a substantial advantage to candidates who can win rural voters, and here we are.
Don't forget our ridiculous Congressional system that greatly over-weights the opinions of rural voters. California has 80 times the number of people as Wyoming, yet they both get two seats in the Senate and 1/53rd the number of representatives in the House.
> Don't forget our ridiculous Congressional system that greatly over-weights the opinions of rural voters.
No, it overweights the opinions of voters in low-population states.
Sure, California voters are underrepresented compared to Wyoming voters, but California has about ten times as many people living in rural areas as Wyoming has people in total; Rhode Island is nearly as overrepresented as Wyoming, but nearly as urban as California.
Giving more political power to rural areas is not necessarily a bad thing. One can argue that it is beneficial in that it compensates for the sparseness of those areas and lets them participate in the game on the national stage.
I think the problem with rural areas is not their overly great political influence but rather the fact that they have been abandoned by mainstream politicians.
I don't understand why you need to compensate for the sparseness of those areas. They're people just like I am. Land doesn't and shouldn't get its own say in the system.
Lets them participate in the game? They could still participate if they had an equal voice. Their weight on the national stage wouldn't be huge, since they're only 15% of the population, but getting 15% of the voice for 15% of the population seems fair to me. The rural population is similar in size to the black population. Should we give black people a disproportionate vote so they can better participate on the national stage?
mikeash's comment pretty much sums it up, however I'd recommend reading Scott Adams's (dilbert creator) rhetoric on Trump.
Scott Adams definitely is more right leaning than myself, but he writes top notch political analysis. He saw the Trump victory coming a mile away.
Trump is the epitome of "speak to be heard, not listened to", and this resonates incredibly well with the large bulk of the republican party whose party platform is "the blacks", "the muslims", or "jesus (when convenient)". He also resonates well with the republicans who are not stupid, however wealthy and self-interested, because much of republican rhetoric centers on "the rich are going to starve/move to mars if we start charging them taxes!".
Republicans with a libertarian or intellectual bent think he's 100% retarded. Reactionary democrats think he's going to make the world explode. The rest of us left-leaning folks think he's retarded but realize that this is the single best thing that could have happened to ward off any notion younger people might have that the republican party isn't one great big 3 ring circus. Hillary Clinton getting elected would have just been more ammunition for the clowns that think she's corrupt and a literal communist despite being corrupt and center-right by all measures.
It is very unlikely that something like this will happen again in the near future, seeing as all of the old people voting for trump will be dead, and younger people are either blindly liberal, or spooked out of any notion that the republican party isn't a joke.
I've actually never thought i would say this, but my "admiration" for the US has drasticly declined the last few months. I think this also affects "Silicon Valley".
PS. Am i right that your President only had a one hit wonder with Trump Tower, with daddy's money. Then licensed everything ( the few things he did with casino's failed). And ... He is now the president, because he was in a TV-show? Or am i missing something?