No matter what other harm Trump does, withdrawing from the TPP will be a very good thing for the US.

It was already unofficially dead, but this puts the spike in its heart.

On balance, I think relatively-open trade is a good thing; however, the TPP was a deal negotiated in secret by large corporations, with overreaching and onerous copyright restrictions, little to no protection of worker rights, and was mostly a racket to protect corporations from competition and lawsuits, even above the power of sovereign nations.

It is a very, very good thing that it is dead.

When I was in school, there was some space shuttle simulator computer game we used to play.

I don’t recall its name, but I do remember that there was a bug that if you crashed the shuttle calamitously enough while attempting landing, it’d say something like: “11 out of 7 astronauts on board died.”

Of course for us the game became all about how we could for example orbitally slingshot the shuttle around the moon to slam it into the earth at 60,000mph or any other method we could discover to arrange for the most fiery, disastrous crash.

My speculation is that the designers and coders didn’t consider that anyone would devise ways to crash the space shuttle as devastatingly as possible to cause the most fatalities, so they coded nothing to check if someone went beyond whatever bound they’d established for a “normal” crash.

My memories are hazy as I was 10 or so at the time, but I think one of us eventually got it to say, “20 out of 7 astronauts on board died.”

And that my coders is why you test your software for scenarios that you think surely no one will ever try.

Pondering why Bernie was and is so hated by the so many on the left. There were many reasons of course, but it wasn’t just I think that he deigned to oppose Clinton, but rather it’s about classism.

Not classism directly against Bernie (mostly, though he is one of the least wealthy people in the Senate), but rather indirectly as he appealed to the “deplorables” so despised by the Clinton coalition.

Classism is the prejudice we daren’t name and aren’t allowed to speak about. And no, I am not just talking about against poor whites, but rather that the Democrats would like to pretend that class just doesn’t exist — mostly because if they discuss it, it could lead to poor whites, poor blacks and other non-college-educated undesirables colluding and seizing some measure of power and thus inconveniencing the rich.

In that way, the Democrat coalition of affluent professionals, the college educated and the Wall Street mandarins are just as racist and desirous of enforcing racial ineqity as the neo-nazis in Trump’s creaky confederation.