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You lost me at: "Government Announces Steps to Restore Confidence"

• gcatalfamo 13y ago
  It's morning here and I (not literally) spit my coffee reading those same words
• venomsnake 13y ago
  This is classic case of moving targets. There is what is politically feasible at any given moment and what is needed - when they do not overlap. The moment the needed becomes feasible the new thing needed to calm stuff down becomes politically impossible because the situation has worsened a lot. Typical case was the Euro crisis of 2009-2011. The USG is caught in weird position right now. The NSA story would have been easy to defuse in June with few bold steps. Now they seem inadequate. And we have a weak presidency and gridlocked congress. And the real fun is Putin just made the rift between them even bigger with a very good diplomatic move. So they cannot move together again to fix the NSA situation for a long time.
• skore 13y ago
  Trust is a fickle thing, but one thing that I have learned is that one vital element to building trust is to refrain from announcing your intention of doing so. Even having a "plan to build trust" is questionable - if you need to make such a plan, most likely you have already lost any chance of succeeding. People must build trust entirely by themselves. If they don't build it themselves, it's not trust. It's persuasion. And the willingness to be persuaded has been eliminated rather thoroughly, lately.