The New York Times reported that Donald Trump was involved in another fleece-the-buyer scheme, aside from Trump University.
He also launched Trump Institute, which promised to teach naive customers his real estate secrets so they could get rich like him. As the Times article shows, some of its lessons were plagiarized word-for-word from other sources.
As with Trump University, the Trump Institute promised falsely that its teachers would be handpicked by Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump did little, interviews show, besides appear in an infomercial — one that promised customers access to his vast accumulated knowledge. “I put all of my concepts that have worked so well for me, new and old, into our seminar,” he said in the 2005 video, adding, “I’m teaching what I’ve learned.”
Reality fell far short. In fact, the institute was run by a couple who had run afoul of regulators in dozens of states and had been dogged by accusations of deceptive business practices and fraud for decades. Similar complaints soon emerged about the Trump Institute.
Yet there was an even more fundamental deceit to the business, unreported until now: Extensive portions of the materials that students received after paying their seminar fees, supposedly containing Mr. Trump’s special wisdom, had been plagiarized from an obscure real estate manual published a decade earlier….
Together, the exaggerated claims about his own role, the checkered pasts of the people with whom he went into business and the theft of intellectual property at the venture’s heart all illustrate the fiction underpinning so many of Mr. Trump’s licensing businesses: Putting his name on products and services — and collecting fees — was often where his actual involvement began and ended.
As P.T. Barnum said, “There a sucker born every minute.” I had no idea there were so many of them. I hope this racist, xenophobe, misogynist isn’t the next leader of the free world.
Upon reading the article, my question about who grifted who was answered. Trump was in fact conned, apparently by the sales pitch of the couple that actually ran Trump Institute, and didn’t bother to check into who they were at all, a fact that is further evidence that if elected POTUS, he will just be phoning in whatever is presented to him by whoever presents it. He will be a figurehead at the very best.
I read Trump is talking to Chris Christie as a possible running mate. Now that would be a ticket that P.T. Barnum would appreciate.
Ms. Parker said she did venture to one of the Trump Institute seminars — and was appalled: The speakers came off like used-car salesmen, she said, and their advice was nothing but banalities. “It was like I was in sleaze America,” she said. “It was all smoke and mirrors.”
And white suede shoes with maroon belt and tie?
Recalling the first used car salesman I decided not to deal with.
Trump is a used Casino salesman.
Nate Silver just released his first official prediction for the general election and said that at this time Hillary has an 80% chance to win. He also cautioned that this can change because the further you are out from the actual election day, the higher the odds are that the prediction is not all that accurate.
Trump has until early November to change the tide in his favor and if he can’t do that, then HRC is the next president of the U.S.
But with Silver’s track record, what he predicts much closer to the the election will probably happen.
http://www.businessinsider.com/nate-silver-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-2016-6
One needs to be very careful taking Silver’s “predictions” at face value.
Unfortunately, Silver does not understand the concept of uncertainty. In fact, failure to understand uncertainty was the primary thing that climate scientist Mike Mann chastised Silver over in Mann’s piece “FiveThirtyEight: The Number of Things Nate Silver Gets Wrong About Climate Change”
Cautioning that ‘things might change” is not the same as providing an actual estimate of uncertainty. Not even close.
“80% chance to win” does not mean anything if the uncertainty is 80%.
There are several important “unknowns” at this stage (not least of all the FBI investigation of Clinton’s emails) that could have a quite profound effect on the outcome (even if Clinton is not indicted)
Nate Silver predicted a year ago that there was just a 2% chance that Trump would not get the nomination — and we know how accurate that was. The telling part was the way Silver made that prediction. He artificially divided up the primary season into stages and pretty much arbitrarily estimated that there was a 50% chance that Trump would survive each time and move on to the next stage. It was really just ridiculous. Not the least bit scientific.
Predicting individual state outcomes close to the election is not all that impressive because in most cases, the polls are plenty accurate and when they are not accurate, even Silver’s results can be off significantly.
Quite frankly, i don’t get the fascination with all this prediction stuff. What is the point?
It’s one thing to say that someone is ahead in the polls by X points when the poll has a margin of error of Y points. That has a well defined meaning. But to say they have an “80% chance to win” is not particularly enlightening (to say the least).
Silver has admitted that the odds of making a mistake with his predictions are higher the further out we are from an election and more accurate closer to it, and climate change can’t be confirmed by public opinion polls.
This far out, the odds are that this prediction is far from accurate becasue so much can change in a 24 hour news cycle.
Sorry,
Should have been
Silver predicted that there was just a 2% chance that Trump would get the nomination
I should make it clear that uncertainty works both ways.
There is also a lot of uncertainty surrounding trump (to say the least) which could have a profound impact on the election.
Silver does not have any better handle on that than anyone else.
he’s not a psychic, though sometimes he seems to pretend he is.
By the way, if one were to use the standard (gambler’s) “expectation” interpretation of ‘80% chance of winning”, one might expect that Clinton would be President 4 out of every five days and Trump would be President on the remaining day.
But that is clearly a meaningless interpretation.
Or maybe we should use the ‘80% chance of rain” analogy.
80% chance that Clinton wins means 80% of the country will have Clinton as president and the other 20% will have Trump.
or, worded slightly differently, “80% will be rained on by Clinton” and “20% rained on by Trump”.
or maybe that should be “reigned on by”
.Here’s an interesting take on the “Amazing Nate Silver” and his wondrous mathemagical capabilities
“Our fictional pundit predicted more correct primary results than Nate Silver did”
“Even when all of Silver’s models for a given race turn up wrong, it never seems to be FiveThirtyEight’s fault. When the site badly whiffed on last year’s British election, it was the pollsters who erred. Their mea culpa after Michigan’s Democratic primary, which Sanders won by 1.5 percentage points even though Silver’s model gave Clinton a greater than 99 percent chance of winning, was titled “Why the Polls Missed Bernie Sanders’s Michigan Upset.” After the Indiana primary, Diggler’s tongue-in-cheek victory lap was met with scoffs from Silver fans who explained that Silver gave Sanders a 10 percent chance of winning, and that things with a 10 percent chance of happening do happen from time to time.”
Unfortunately, if Silver won’t provide an actual estimate of the uncertainty for every one of his predictions and explain precisely how he arrived at that uncertainty, his predictions mean little (if anything).
Without the uncertainty estimate, what he is doing has nothing to do with science.
Simply admitting that predictions done far in advance are more subject to error certainly does not make what he is doing scientific.
Silver should stick to doing predictions right before the elections when the uncertainty has become relatively small.
Claiming that Clinton has an “80% chance of winning” at this point is just meaningless drivel.
Sorry, but this kind of crap (which is what it is) really bothers me. Economists like Silver do it all the time and pretend to be scientific.
And it is a HUGE mistake to believe Silver this far out because, as I indicated above, he is the guy who told us that Trump had just a 2% chance of getting the Republican nomination — and if you look at what he based that on, it was little more than his own ignorance combined with a large dose of hubris.
I’m sorry, I have been trying to refrain from going off topic. I visited The Answer Sheet this morning, though, and now I feel compelled to express a concern (while unable to reply in the Washington Post’s site). I suppose this is loosely related to Donal Trump via the Brexit and trade deals. That’s what this comment is about, a post on the Brexit.
Mark Tucker wrote a post. In the Answer Sheet! He wrote that countries like the U.S. and UK can never have a middle class again without education reform. I thought we were all in agreement that strong unions and Wall Street regulation have always been and will always be the ways to mitigate income inequality, not standardized testing. Improving education is a constant goal, but it doesn’t stop companies from outsourcing and hiring contractors instead of employees. It doesn’t stop Big Tech from decimating wages, both for high- and low-skilled professions. And the testing data are being misused and are not improving education anyway. How did Big Data Mark Tucker wind up there? To me it’s like this blog hosting an essay on inequality by David Coleman. Or Trump.
LeftCoast,
That’s why I didn’t repost the Tucker piece
I agree that standardized tests do not create jobs or rebuild the middle class
Thank you. I’m just so tired of being blamed and punished by the barons for everything beyond my control. I’ve been hurt formerly trusted news sources, and so I’ve come to rely on great people like you and Valerie to create spaces of refuge from the propaganda.
***BREAKING NEWS***
The California Supreme Court refused to grant an appeal to the Vergara plaintiffs.
This ends this case, as it is limited to the state, and cannot be appealed to the U.S
.Supreme Court. The plaintiffs had earlier put out statements that they were confident that the Supreme Court would gran an appeal.
The article BELOW is quite articulate on the matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/06/30/the-real-problem-isnt-teachers/
Ahh, that’s the stuff! Thank you.
Friedrichs, not Vergara, but still good.
Cornerstone Charters announces plans for “explosive” growth in Detroit:
http://www.freep.com/story/news/education/2016/06/30/cornerstone-charters-expansion-plans/86529582/
Anyone can open as many charter schools as they want in Detroit, apparently.
I can read all of this garbage on a variety of internet postings as well as questionable work done by the Clintons. How about sticking to the topic of children’s education, please.
You should start your own blog.