Nintendo isn’t abandoning its other handheld platform, the 3DS, just yet. If there were any doubt about its sincerity, then this latest announcement should banish that. Though it’ll probably earn some ridicule at this point. It has just announced a New Nintendo 2DS XL that is, as the name says, larger than the Old Nintendo 2DS. But don’t worry about … Continue reading
WASHINGTON ― Just three months into his presidency, Donald Trump’s bestselling The Art of the Deal might be due for a sequel: The Humility of the Failed Bluff.
The boastful businessman who claimed that his negotiating skills were unsurpassed appears to have met his match a number of times already.
Trump went from accusing the Chinese of manipulating their currency to agreeing that they didn’t. He has not made any visible progress in forcing Mexico to pay for a border wall. He was talked out of abandoning the North American Free Trade Agreement by the leaders of Mexico and Canada. And he was unable to bully Democrats into working with him to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
“He has folded like a lawn chair at the slightest hint of pressure, and he’s getting played like a violin by enemies like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un,” said Adam Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to retired Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
In Mexico, the country Trump has vilified since the start of his campaign nearly two years ago, a senator told The New York Times that political leaders there have started to see Trump primarily as a “bluffer.”
“In front of a bluffer, you always have to maintain a firm and dignified position,” Armando Ríos Piter told the Times.
Some Trump supporters challenge that view. Michael Caputo, a western New York political consultant who worked for Trump’s primary campaign last year, said Ríos and others who underestimate Trump will be sorry.
“Bluffers win. And they win big,” Caputo said. “At the end of the poker game that the senator is speaking about, we’ll end up with more chips. The senator is going to be awful surprised and out of the game early.”
But other Trump allies, including radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh, are starting to fret about Trump’s strategy. “I’m not happy to have to pass this on,” Limbaugh told his listeners earlier this week. “But it looks like, from here, right here, right now, it looks like President Trump is caving on his demand for a measly $1 billion in the budget for his wall on the border with Mexico.”
On the campaign trail, Trump marketed himself as the ultimate closer, a tough-talking businessman who could renegotiate trade deals and international agreements to better benefit the American worker. He regularly disparaged “weak” and “stupid” leaders in Washington for failing to accomplish what someone who had actually sat at a boardroom table could easily do once in the Oval Office.
“I’ve watched the politicians. I’ve dealt with them all my life,” Trump said in 2015. “If you can’t make a good deal with a politician, then there’s something wrong with you. You’re certainly not very good.”
Nearly 100 days into his presidency, however, Trump appears to be finding the job is much tougher than he imagined. He has issued bold ultimatums in negotiations on health care, immigration and trade only to have to back down. While his predecessor once said he never bluffed on the world stage, Trump has embraced the risky tactic on both foreign and domestic fronts ― with little to show for it.
“People put in for the TV character of Donald Trump, a hyper-confident negotiator, a wheeler-dealer mogul,” said GOP strategist Rick Wilson. “The real Donald Trump is a 70-year-old man who inherited a bunch of money who’s been bankrupt four times and who basically turned into a branding company.… He’s intellectually sloppy and temperamentally unsuited for the job.”
In the health care debate, Trump has been all over the map. He first warned Republican lawmakers that he would leave the Affordable Care Act in place and move on to other priorities unless they approved a bill to repeal and replace it. The ultimatum failed to sway skeptical conservatives in the House, and lawmakers bolted town for a two-week recess without voting on the measure. He and his aides then threatened to reach out to Democrats to resuscitate his stalled agenda, but that too went out the window. This week, the administration is once again pushing for a party-line vote on an Obamacare repeal bill.
Trump’s bluster toward Democrats also fell flat. Earlier this month, he threatened to sabotage Obamacare if they didn’t agree to proposed changes regarding the law. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney announced Wednesday that the administration was considering cutting off crucial payments to health insurance companies ― a move that would be devastating for people who buy coverage on their own, rather than through employers. Later that day, less than 48 hours before a crucial government funding deadline, Trump backed down and said he would honor the payments after all.
People put in for the TV character of Donald Trump, a hyper-confident negotiator, a wheeler-dealer mogul.
GOP strategist Rick Wilson
Trump didn’t fare any better on funding his proposed border wall, either. Facing likely odds of a government shutdown, the president on Tuesday backed off demands that Democrats agree to fund the construction of a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border ― the same wall he said Mexico would pay for on the campaign trail. Trump maintained that the wall remained a priority and that it would eventually get built. But it’s hard to see what more he could do to persuade Democrats to vote to fund the wall between now and the next round of budget talks in September.
That issue, because it was a promise repeated throughout his campaign, could do Trump serious damage if he doesn’t deliver, said Ari Fleischer, a press secretary to former President George W. Bush.
“I think Trump must demonstrate this year, not necessarily now, progress toward building the wall or his base will be disappointed,” Fleischer said. “He went too far in saying Mexico will pay for it, but I believe his base cares far more about it being built and a lot less about who pays.”
Trump’s efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement may yet bear fruit. His threat to pull the U.S. out of the agreement brought Canada and Mexico to the negotiating table this week. But it’s less clear what kind of concessions he’ll be able to wring out of them. Even Trump admitted that withdrawing from the trade pact would amount to a “shock to the system.”
“If I’m unable to make a fair deal for the United States, meaning a fair deal for our workers and our companies, I will terminate NAFTA. But we’re going to give renegotiation a good, strong shot,” he said at the White House on Thursday.
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A California government council is warning that climate change could cause ocean waters off the coast to rise far higher than previously anticipated ― an increase in sea-level by as much as 10 feet by the end of the century.
This worst-case scenario would destroy airports in Oakland and San Francisco, and would swamp roadways, low-lying bridges, railroad tracks, farmland, beaches and some towns. As many as 42,000 homes would be completely submerged, warns the report released this month by a California Ocean Protection Council advisory team. The council adopted an updated report with higher sea-level estimates on Wednesday.
The dire prediction follows the Louisiana governor’s declaration of an emergency over the state’s vanishing coastline. Louisiana could lose as much as 2,250 square miles of shorline to rising waters in the next 50 years, Gov. John Bel Edwards noted.
Miami also faces a dangerous increase in sea level. A study in Nature Climate Change last week warned that 2.5 million Miami residents could be driven from their homes by 2100.
In the worse-case scenario in California, waters would rise in the coming decades some 30 times faster than in the last century, according to the Ocean Protection Council report, “Rising Seas in California: An Update on Sea-level Rise Science.”
Without a dramatic change in fossil-fuel emissions, a separate study this month by the U.S. Geological Survey estimated, rising sea level would wipe out up to 67 percent of the beaches in Southern California by 2100.
In the best-case scenario — only if fossil-fuel emissions are significantly curbed — levels in the San Francisco Bay area would still increase up to 2.4 feet. Even that could be devastating to property, infrastructure and the economy, the council’s report warns.
The team revised earlier estimates upward because ice sheets in the Antarctic and Greenland are melting at an increasingly rapid pace. In addition, global warming effects are already being seen, and new discoveries have added to scientific knowledge about what’s happening, according to the report. The report was last revised four years ago.
California has some of the toughest anti-pollution measures in the nation, yet its 1,100-mile coastline is extremely vulnerable to climate change. Researchers now believe Antarctic ice melts hit the West Coast particularly hard because of the Earth’s rotation and gravitational pull on ocean waters. “For every foot of global sea-level rise caused by the loss of ice on West Antarctica, sea-level will rise approximately 1.25 feet along the California coast,” the report notes.
U.S. policy is unlikely to turn the corner and severely curb fossil fuel use and emissions under President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax,” and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt, who says he is skeptical that humans and CO2 are the main cause of global warming.
The Ocean Protection Council was created by California to help prepare for the consequences of rising ocean levels, including property destruction and economic impact.
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He misses driving, feels as if he is in a cocoon, and is surprised how hard his new job is.
President Donald Trump on Thursday reflected on his first 100 days in office with a wistful look at his life before the White House.
“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,” Trump told Reuters in an interview. “This is more work than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
A wealthy businessman from New York, Trump assumed public office for the first time when he entered the White House on Jan. 20 after he defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in an upset.
More than five months after his victory and two days shy of the 100-day mark of his presidency, the election is still on Trump’s mind. Midway through a discussion about Chinese President Xi Jinping, the president paused to hand out copies of what he said were the latest figures from the 2016 electoral map.
“Here, you can take that, that’s the final map of the numbers,” the Republican president said from his desk in the Oval Office, handing out maps of the United States with areas he won marked in red. “It’s pretty good, right? The red is obviously us.”
He had copies for each of the three Reuters reporters in the room.
Trump, who said he was accustomed to not having privacy in his “old life,” expressed surprise at how little he had now. And he made clear he was still getting used to having 24-hour Secret Service protection and its accompanying constraints.
“You’re really into your own little cocoon, because you have such massive protection that you really can’t go anywhere,” he said.
When the president leaves the White House, it is usually in a limousine or an SUV.
He said he missed being behind the wheel himself.
“I like to drive,” he said. “I can’t drive any more.”
Many things about Trump have not changed from the wheeler-dealer executive and former celebrity reality show host who ran his empire from the 26th floor of Trump Tower in New York and worked the phones incessantly.
He frequently turns to outside friends and former business colleagues for advice and positive reinforcement. Senior aides say they are resigned to it.
The president has been at loggerheads with many news organizations since his election campaign and decided not to attend the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington on Saturday because he felt he had been treated unfairly by the media.
“I would come next year, absolutely,” Trump said when asked whether he would attend in the future.
The dinner is organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association. Reuters correspondent Jeff Mason is its president.
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On the same day Facebook released its report on global government requests for the second half of 2016, its Threat Intelligence team announced new steps the social giant is taking to combat so-called “Information Operations.” The report is tacit ackn…
Nintendo has a new handheld video game system it released pretty much out of the blue on Thursday. The 2DS XL is basically a 3DS XL without the 3D, with a smaller physical footprint for more portability, but with the same size large, dual displays you’ll find on the 3DS XL. The new console hits store shelves July 28, so we’ll still have to wait a while to get our hands on one, but… Read More
Facebook co-founder and gajillionaire Mark Zuckerberg visited the Ford Rouge plant outside of Detroit today and helped build some Ford F-150s. It was his first (first!) time in Michigan. Zuck is truly a man of the people.
Bandai Namco’s Tekken franchise is an interesting one. While other arcade games might have more traditional characters, Tekken actually introduced some interesting and quirky characters such as bears, pandas, a man made from wood, and so on. They also introduced a character named Roger Jr., which is a kangaroo that boxes.
Unfortunately it seems that the character will no longer make the final game in Tekken 7. In an interview with VG247, the game’s producer Katsuhiro Harada, it seems that there are concerns that animal activists would complain about the character, which is why they made the decision to take it out of the game.
According to Harada, “There was a video of a man’s dog being headlocked by a kangaroo, and he punched it in the face. It turned into a big problem. People were complaining about him punching a kangaroo. It seems that in the last few years there’s a lot more animal activists – even though they probably wouldn’t play our game they would still hear about that, about a kangaroo in our game being punched, and would complain about it.”
As to why Kuma the bear is still in the game versus Roger Jr., Harada reasoned that this is because a bear is “obviously stronger than a human being.”
Tekken 7’s Roger The Kangaroo Removed Over Animal Activists Concerns , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
While features like display size, battery life, resolution, processor speed, and camera quality are great marketing tools, sometimes a device’s usability comes from its lesser marketed features. A good example would be in the case of 22-year old college student Casey Bennett who recently got into a car accident, but thanks to an accessibility feature built into his Apple Watch, he managed to call for help.
According to Bennett, he was driving to class earlier this month when his car was hit by another driver and it flipped over. The airbags in the car deployed which kept Bennett from suffering greater harm and his seat belt also helped to keep him in place. However the accident also saw his iPhone fall from the center console to the ground, in which Bennett was unable to reach it to call 911.
He figured that if he couldn’t reach his phone, he’d just have to wait there and hope someone already called for help, but that’s when he remember he had his Apple Watch with him and by pressing down on the side button for an extended period of time, an SOS call will be made. We suppose ultimately someone would have seen the accident and called 911 on Bennett’s behalf, but if anything it does highlight how important some accessibility features are.
Apple Watch Used To Make SOS Call After Car Crash , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
Monitors come in different shapes, sizes, and resolutions. They also come with different specs, with some of them calibrated to suit the needs of creative professionals, while others have been designed for gamers in mind. If you are after a new gaming monitor, then you might be interested to learn that Acer has a new monitor for you.
At a recent Acer event, the company has taken the wraps off its latest monitor in the form of the Predator X27. This is a monitor that comes pretty much all kinds of gaming/high-end specs into one, sugar as G-Sync HDR, a 4K resolution, and a 144Hz refresh rate. It also features quantum dot technology and has 384 individually controlled LED zones to help with the contrast of HDR.
It also supports NVIDIA’s ULMB technology which basically helps to make fast-on screen movement come off as smooth and crisp as possible. We’re also talking about features such as Tobii eye-tracking. It also sports a rather interesting design where there’s a hood over the top and sides of the monitor, presumably to help make it more immersive and also cut glare from external light sources.
In terms of availability, Acer has yet to mention when. There is also no word on pricing but given its size and specs and the fact that it is marketed as a gaming monitor (which typically doesn’t come cheap), prepare to set aside a fair amount of change if you do plan on getting it.
Acer Unveils Predator X27 G-Sync HDR 4K Gaming Monitor , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
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