What you said is all true, which is what makes the focus on Alphabet/Google mixup so out of touch. There are so many other problems, that focusing on a mistake about the details of Google's corporate structure seems like focusing on the alignment of the deck-chairs on the Titanic.

I will very readily admit that I've not made a huge distinction between Alphabet, Google, and Verily. And for that matter Waymo, the Google self-driving car project. Or is that the Alphabet self-driving car project. I have no idea, without checking Wikipedia, if Project Loon (Internet-via-weather-balloon) is a Project of Google or an Alphabet subsidiary, or some other legal shenanigans.

There are so many other things going wrong right now that I am severely disappointed that the Verge wasted any words talking about the distinction between Alphabet and Google, no matter how much I may, or may not, like the individual that confused the two.

I feel like this debate is analogous to the test kits being rejected from 3rd parties, if that’s what happened. We’re lost in bureaucratic technicalities.

Verily was a division of Google X before Alphabet. It’s effectively Google Life Sciences minus the corporate advantages of the Alphabet structure.

Maybe Kushner or the President wanted to encourage Google, or maybe a speechwriter over exaggerated it. Or maybe the President lied. But when the media ultra parses the controversy to make every element the nth degree worse for him, it makes it hard to believe in objectivity at all.

...or maybe trump heard something in a briefing and said what he thought he understood, instead of what he'd been told. And without, you know, coordinating or having the speech fact checked before delivering it to millions of people. The dude doesn't do process... See also, walking back the "no trade with Europe" thing a few days ago.

He doesn't get a lot of slack (outside the right wing machine) because he's repeatedly foot-gunned in dramatic and damaging ways.

And um, when does one have to stop blaming the previous administration for the current's failings? He did not inherit a "dysfunctional CDC" that is pure BS. He has called COVID-19 a hoax, that it would but just like the cold, that you could go to work with it, and that the number would "soon be zero" (number of cases).

He has no idea what he is doing and only cares about his own reelection regardless of the risk that puts Americans in.

Yes, the best way to fix something dysfunctional is to slash its budget, repeatedly make statements contrary to what they actually say, and downplay worldwide pandemics.

Without conceding the point of prior dysfunction, I have to say that trump has yet to find a bad situation that he can’t make worse.

Right, which is why he shut down the division created to plan and prepare for pandemics, and terminated the position created to organize the response for a pandemic.

The CDC was so dysfunctional that by the swift signing of a pen the CDC has been made great again.

Of course, it took him 2+ months to actually sign the document that waived restrictions (which were Bush era, anyways, and any decent government creates laws for the norms, but provides power to override them in case of an out of the norm situation, which Trump waited 2 months to do because he insisted it must be business as usual).

It was Kushner. I live in CA and President Trump isn’t hated here as one would think from the media.

You must not live in my part of CA!

As Tim Pool said, California is the king of greed. A lot of rich people secretly support him and working class people who have to deal with the societal breakdown that is California politics.

4.5 million people or 32% of the voters in CA voted for President Trump in 2016. Democracies of uneducated masses (on both sides) don’t make any one side intrinsically right. Cue Socrates.

That's why Socrates tells you that you become valid to run society when you become dialectically educated enough, and that the unwashed masses do not see reality for how it is as a result of a lack of dialectical education and therefore should not rule.

Sounds pretty much like authoritarian rationalism to me. I'd like a pass on platonic republicanism but unfortunately it's found within all forms of Western philosophy these days