They're still planning the G7 for Trump's club during it's off season (filling the otherwise empty rooms).
Just gonna leave this here for @bobknight33 before he tries to defend and excuse yet another blatant violation of the constitution....

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Emolument: a salary, fee, or profit from employment or office.

Any fee of any kind whatever....so no, claiming he's renting the resort "at cost" means nothing....less than nothing when you understand that he claims his subcontractors can make any profit they wish as long as the property doesn't profit, and he uses Trump subcontractors that can set their own price with no negotiations. That's exactly how he bankrupted his casinos.

I wish I could qualty that. I deal with office furniture in various government and government subcontractor buildings in the DC and northern Virginia area. I have seen so much wasted tax dollars. It's insane.

If Hinkley Point C is any indication, you're not going to find someone to finance/build a nuclear power plant, not in a capitalist society.

It's a massive upfront investment that private entities are basically allergic to; it cannot be insured due to the massive damage caused if things go south on you, so you need the government to act as a backstop; the price you'd have to charge per MWh is humongous compared to solar/wind, so you need massive subsidies, and that's without the ridiculous amount of rent-seeking corporations insist on nowadays.

That, to me, sounds like private is out. Hinkley Point C is being built by EDF, aka the French state, and EDF is struggling not be dragged into the abys by Areva, after the EPR in Flamanville is nothing short of a financial disaster. And we're not even talking about the troubles they are in for having fudged the specifications on the pressure vessels of more than 20 French power plants. Cost-cutting measures, as always.

So, which capitalist state is going to pick up the tab? Any volunteers? Over here, we cannot even get bridges fixed before they collapse...

And to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I would want a profit-oriented enterprise or austerity-supporting government construct something like an NPP these days. Look at the construction sites at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, they are modern towers of Babylon, with subcontractors of subcontractors from 30 different countries working for povery wages. Anyone think either of these, should they ever be finished at all, will come even close to the safety standards layed out in their official plans?

For anyone that hasn't followed what this is about...

For the problems itemized in this video.
Loss of :
- power brake assist
- airbags
- power steering.

This affair was actually about 1 specific issue :
The detent in the key socket rotator was not as strong as it should have been.

What that specifically meant was that :
IF you had a large heavy keychain on your key, and you jerked it, or knocked it such that it swings hard, the keychain could pull on the key hard enough to turn the key to the OFF position.

So when the car would turn off, you'd lose the power brakes, power steering, and airbags would be inactive.

Under "normal" circumstances, this wasn't a problem.
But for the folks with a christmas tree hanging off of their key, it was a chance to turn off their car while driving.

(side note : Crying about the power steering and power brakes really misses the big issue : The steering lock can kick in while moving... which apparently no one gave enough of a crap about to think for the 2 seconds it takes to notice that elephant in the room)



In this case, the contention over whether or not the core problem with the key socket was negligence boils down to semantics.

Car companies buy their parts from sub contractors.
They spec out the parts, and sub contractors manufacture the parts 'to spec'.

The spec isn't a 'hard' requirement.
If you say "5 Newtons of force", that doesn't mean that 4.999999999999123 Newtons is unacceptable.

Actually, it's standard for ~all parts to not be exactly the spec. They just have to be 'close enough to work right'.

And for that matter, many of the numbers in various specs are 'off the cuff' values that are 'generally known to work fine'. Getting hung up on a specific number isn't salient - what matters is 'does it work right?'.

So the question becomes, what is "good enough to work right?".
In practice, that ends up being a judgment call. Often made by engineers that try out the parts.


Here's where congress and GM differed.

Congress said : The ignition socket wasn't 100% exactly what GM had in the spec that they sent to the subcontractors, so it was wrong from day 1, and they knew it wasn't 100% the spec since pre-production. Hence, GM was negligent.

GM said : Of course it wasn't 100% exactly the spec. That was to be expected. At the time, we had no indication that the actual provided part was so far out of spec that it would not work right.


My personal take :
If this was something as simple as 'actual malfunctions/breakages of parts', then it would be black and white.
But in these cases, nothing was actually broken or malfunctioning.
So you had to rely on statistics and analysis to identify the issue.
Statistics require data, data requires evidence, evidence requires time to collect.
Seeing as how the vast majority of cars had no problem, this isn't the kind of thing that just leaps out at you.

Since any given car, when made in massive quantities, will have all kinds of multiple complaints about multiple systems, you can't just go back and point at incident(s) X and Y and say that it was the smoking gun - because if it was, then you'd have a pile of smoking guns for every other part out there.
Every instance of every part has a small chance of going bad, and with enough cars, you'll have a lot of 'item A went bad' reports to sift through.
You can't jump to the conclusion after the first couple reports that the part is improper, and it's unrealistic to expect anyone to immediately make that conclusion.
In order to make an informed determination, you simply need a pattern to emerge.

(I listened to the CSPAN coverage of the hearings while driving.)

-scheherazade

>> ^Sagemind:

On that same note, why are these workers staying with these employers.
After the first check is missed, they should be "Out the door."


Because a lot of these jobs are low skill. Since we have high levels of unemployment, there is no shortage of people looking for jobs. So employers have all the power. If you don't want to deal with the company, they can easily find ten people who would be willing to have the job you vacated. Plus I would imagine that a lot of these people don't have the money to hire a lawyer to effectively sue the company.

The video also mentioned about subcontractors who hire illegal immigrants, then call the police on themselves before paying them. I would imagine any fines imposed would be less than the money they saved by not paying the wages. Since our immigration process is such a mess, these people have little recourse to fight that due to being here illegal (when they likely should be here legally).

The vote was on an amendment to a Defense Department appropriations bill. The full text of the amendment can be found here, it's S10069, and S10070 only.

The text reads:

(a) None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made available by this Act may be used for any existing or new Federal contract if the contractor or a subcontractor at any tier requires that an employee or independent contractor, as a condition of employment, sign a contract that mandates that the employee or independent contractor performing work under the contract or subcontract resolve through arbitration any claim under title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or any tort related to or arising out of sexual assault or harassment, including assault and battery, intentional infliction of emotional distress, false imprisonment, or negligent hiring, supervision, or retention.

(b) The prohibition in subsection (a) does not apply with respect to employment contracts that may not be enforced in a court of the United States.

It's not really particularly controversial, unless of course you believe that companies have the right to demand people surrender their right to protection from criminal activities commited on them as a condition of employment.

Yall are really something else. The amount of trust you place in people you don't know is really quite amazing.

THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. Or were these historical events "conspiracies" as well:

Baxter Pharmaceutical Mixed Deadly Avian Flu H5N1 with a Flu Vaccine about to be shipped to 180,000 people!
http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/02/27/8560781.html
"The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.

The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses. "

Bayer knowingly sold HIV-contaminated vaccines!
http://www.naturalnews.com/News_000647_Bayer_vaccines_HIV.html
"In 2006, it was discovered that Bayer found out a vaccine it was selling in the United States was accidentally contaminated with HIV.

In order to cover its tracks, say the journalists in this video (below), Bayer pulled the vaccines off the market and sold them to consumers in Japan, France, Spain and other countries, where hemophiliacs were then contaminated with HIV due to the vaccine."

Mandatory Polio vaccines contaminated with SV40, causes Cancer!
http://www.healthy.net/scr/Article.asp?Id=2703
"The sudden rise in the number of deaths from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma may be linked to the polio vaccine given to children in the USA until 1963.

Researchers have found the polyomavirus known as simian virus 40 (SV40) in a large number of lymphoma sufferers - the same virus that was in the contaminated batch of polio vaccines.

The vaccine was prepared in rhesus monkey kidney cells, but some of the animals were infected with the SV40, which was then passed on to the vaccinated children. In all, millions of children from all 50 states were exposed to the virus from 1955 until 1963, when the vaccine was finally withdrawn.

Latent viruses were such a problem with primary monkey kidney cells that a worldwide moratorium on the licensing of all polio virus vaccines was called in 1967 because of death and illnesses that occurred in monkey kidney workers and vaccine manufacturing facilities"

Doc_M,

You wanna do the world a favor? Buy some off-the-shelf vaccines and do a complete chemical and biological analysis on them, and report your findings publicly. Unless you are giving us a technical lecture, or presenting experimental data, your opinion is really not worth any more than any of us non-virologists.