If this pans out, the Middle East problems will become largely irrelevant, outside the Middle East. And Saudi Arabia will revert to what it always was.
I’m not so sure about that. There is more at stake in the region than just oil revenue, like competing regional influence (with military benefits), mass migrations, exportable terrorism and, of course, the Israel-Arab conflict in which the U.S. has always been knee deep. Turning the region into a resourceless dump of poverty is unlikely to improve things for anyone. If coal country here in the U.S. can effortlessly swing to radical extremes because their outdated jobs have gone away, think of what’s likely to happen in the Middle-East when it’s their turn. It would probably be smart to help them to a soft landing and rebound to better opportunities.
Developing the technologies enabling telepathy will take precisely eight years.
Developing accurate project scheduling techniques will take at least another two thousand years.
Evolving the capability of honest disclosure of accurate project schedules to a pressing venture capitalist will take... Huh, well, that will happen shortly after the second coming, I promise!
There's just so much bullshit anymore it's nearly impossible to accept anything as fact unless it's witnessed first hand.
Quite the opposite. What you witness first hand is a tiny sliver of information that you, as an involved observer, are likely to misinterpret or misunderstand; a mere anecdote that is unlikely to represent any large trend capable of enlightening you much about reality, especially in regard to societal issues. In fact, refusing information other than that directly seen is likely to turn you into an ignorant narrow-minded and yet easily-fooled individual. Ironically, it is for people like you that journalists now focus on serving short videos of “first-hand witness news” (really, unimportant anecdotes) rather than going into detailed, balanced, well-reasoned and well-contextualised explanations based on a large body of observations.
Anything any governmental body says is garbage, and anything the entertainment media says about it is even more garbage just decorated with spin.
Such generalisation and hyperbole is entirely gratuitous and deserves about as much scorn as you are displaying toward governmental institutions and the press at large.
Are you complaining about the topic as being too insignificant to deserve an article (as in: no need to tell people that they way want to update their servers) or are you preemptively commenting that other readers shouldn’t bother to comment on such an insignificant topic?
putting something in the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back out into space
Yes, clearly, our current troubles are caused by the sun, so let’s just decrease the solar energy we receive. Of course, this could have some adverse consequences on photosynthesis and also on solar energy production, but we can always compensate the latter by burning some more fossil fuel.
If you are into alternative medicine that involves the “manipulation of muscle tissue and bones”, I’d suggest seeing a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.) rather than a quack chiropractor. I’m not a fan of osteopathy but, at least, that field has properly educated medical doctors (the aforementioned D.O.s): in the U.S., those are normal physicians with an added specialisation in osteopathy, and they will therefore have the ability to use the gamut of modern medicine like any physician. (On the other hand, I’d suggest avoiding the non-D.O. plain “osteopaths”, who are not physicians.)
- Streamlined penal code
Article 1: ”it is illegal to do things that a police officer finds reprehensible”.
The end.
Having ambiguous laws that effectively leave most of the decision to the discretion of law enforcement is a great way to confuse everybody, signal that those laws are not that important, make police jobs more difficult, increase the risk of corruption, and foster resentment and suspicion of double standards.
Correct me if I’m wrong but if I have malware on my machine that’s capable of starting up my web browser in headless mode (a.k.a. arbitrary executable), well I probably have much more serious issues to address ASAP!
Install a wall, a really big (but beautiful) firewall. Make sure that it is fully paid for by those on the other side. At the firewall’s gate, deploy a large number of DHS-bots that will carefully inspect every single incoming packet, asking for their domain of residency, destination, MAC address where they intend to stay; question their purpose for coming, especially whether they are coming for pimping or terrorist activities; detect any involvement with social media accounts (and obtain associated passwords); and ascertain their true position on net neutrality. Discard any bits of raw meat or soil. Turn back any packets that profess disagreeable beliefs or are framed funny. In case of doubt, call IPSec immediately. For outgoing packets, launch TSA processes instead to perform deep packet inspection. At that stage, it is customary to lose no more than 10% of the packets. For extra security (at the expense of some performance), perform all networking purely within OSI model layers 8 (the convolution layer) and 9 (the administrative redundancy layer). You can regain some of the performance by connecting your Raspberry Pis in parallel rather than in series.
They can make nuclear bombs and chemical weapons (among other things) so, regarding military technology, they’re clearly more advanced than many other countries.
Additionally, if there is something that’s comparatively inexpensive, and does not require procuring tightly-watched materials, it’s cyber-hacking. So it’s clearly the ideal tool for a small nation with limited means, and it’s only logical that they would invest heavily into it. Not only for geopolitical purposes, but even for cash, which they try to get by any means, including criminal operations (well, they probably justify those as “moral” when conducted against the “enemy”).
Overall, I find it entirely logical and even likely that they would jump on any actionable information released by Wikileaks (and others) and quickly exploit it. They are fascist and poor, but that does not make them dummies.
I thought it would be easy to get them to collaborate but none of them -- zero -- chose to cooperate.
This lack of cooperation from the designer should in fact be a requirement for allowing their artifact in the museum. It is the surest sign that it really does belong there.
the Federal Trade Commission has started to collect public comments on this issue
Sure, because this thorny problem is likely to generate many conflicting opinions. For example, there will be those who adamantly oppose voice mail spamming. Then, there will be those who instead express disgust and outrage at the prospect of voice mail spamming. Those opinions will be countered by yet others who will choose to say that voice mail spamming is merely a gross abuse of private resources. Oh, yes, and then, there will be the dead people, the bots and the spammers themselves.
It doesn’t matter that in 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (signed by President George H. W. Bush), reinforced in 2005 by the Junk Fax Prevention Act, had outlawed junk faxes, which are essentially the same thing as junk voice mail, only differing in the medium used (printed page versus computer memory). Noooooo, this is clearly all different, and we obviously need a national reflection on this delicate and quite novel topic.
Because, you never know... We may well find that the prevailing majority of opinions came from the bots.
I tend to agree but it’s not easy to change. Technically, the internet (as I understand it) is just a bunch of interconnected networks, all sending and receiving data. By that standard, we should all be running our own little networks, complete with all the services that we need: DNS, AAA, mail, VoIP, VPN, web, etc., and also the applications that we want: media serving, short message (Tweet-style) publishing, etc. At that point, sites like YouTube or Twitter would only be used either as aggregators (specialised search engines and directories, finding stuff on our servers and linking to it) and as CDNs (for increased performance, if desired by us). The problem (as I see it) is that, instead, the internet has really become more like a giant local network: a bunch of pure clients (consumers) connected to servers (a.k.a. the cloud), with the peculiarity that those servers on the network are run by administrators that are unrelated to each other and to the clients, and who only have their own interest at heart.
To regain some freedom, people would need to be able to serve data freely and effectively. And, right now, most of them cannot, for various reasons:
Their upload speed is abysmal.
Their ISP abusively prohibits them from running a server. Any kind of server.
Their ISP abusively denies them the most basic right of obtaining a static IP range. (And, along with hardware vendors, ISPs have historically contributed to making it near impossible by delaying support for IPv6. And even with IPv6, they have no interest in changing their practice and nobody says anything about it.)
Their connectivity is not neutrally provided by a pure ”dumb pipe” utility that only competes (or is regulated) to provide the best transport possible for the lowest price, with some guarantee of service (as opposed to only a rather bogus “best effort” promise).
They’re stymied by insecure standards (for example, mail) that allow malicious operators (for example, spammers) to operate and proliferate, which in turn may cause major operators to block traffic received from servers typically operated by individuals.
They’re stymied by a dearth of standards that would address new needs (such as those covered by popular social media publishers) to be implemented in a distributed manner (network of independent servers, like the web, with third-party search providers bringing it all together), as opposed to a central service controlling and mining everyone.
They’re not knowledgeable enough to setup and maintain a reliable and secure server. Not because they’re dumb (you can drive, but can you build an automobile?), but because the software is too hard to properly/securely use.
They’re not willing to foot the hardware and electric bill, and low-cost low-energy servers are not widely marketed to the average consumer.
High reliability and high availability are currently too difficult and costly to achieve in a consumer setup.
I don’t see this changing anytime soon, for several reasons:
The infrastructure is seriously lacking.
There is no incentive for commercial operators to invent and deploy standards, technology or services that effectively enable consumers to no longer depend on those operators for anything more than low-value service.
Corporate operators are scared of consumers serving pirated data.
Governments are not active in fostering open standards, and are mostly doing the bidding of major commercial operators.
Yeah, and I love how those futuristic designs always seem to magically solve all problems with some future key technology that is just about to be ready, so do not worry about anything, dear investors.
Well, if they have a fantastic AI that can “predict malfunctions and other problems”, why don’t they commercialise it right now, for use in crewed ships, to “help reduce the number of maritime incidents” right now? And if they don’t have it right now, why don’t they start there and wait till they have it ready, demonstrated and deployed on crewed ships, before selling us an automation pipe dream?
For crying out loud, they’re talking about autonomous airliners and ships while they’re not even yet able to track airliners that go missing over the ocean!
It won’t need to. After all, what are the pirates going to do, once they are on the deck of an automated ship? Start yelling at the main computer angry threats of rebooting it unless it changes course?
I think that it is a good thing for search engines to index information behind paywalls, or any other “obstruction” (for example content of printed books): that would bring us closer to a universal search tool. With paywalls, it could be done using special credentials provided to search engines by the publisher (assuming that a standard gets developed for that). That would solve the problem of the search engine downranking articles for only seeing fragments of them.
On the other hand, I’d want those same search engines to make it easy (through settings) for users to include or exclude such information (by category: paywalled, books, etc.) from the results of their search, with customisable exceptions (for example, a user might want to include results from a firewalled journal to which he subscribes but not others).
No, the question was rhetorical and rather uninformed. In peacetime, one obviously does not casually bomb a country for interfering in elections. And it’s perfectly appropriate not to play armchair diplomat and to instead rely on the executive (particularly, the Dept. of State) to come up with an appropriate response. There is a rather well-practised escalation procedure for such cases, and it does not start at “bomb”.
Fortunately, those horrible crooked corrupt liars guilty of criminal acts are facing the merciless might of implacable yet righteous enemies: the Republican party and Donald Trump, who now fully control all facets of the federal government and therefore have complete freedom to carry out Trump’s campaign promise: that those crooked corrupt liars are going to jail! Drain the swamp! Yeah!
So Well, what are they waiting for, huh? It’s been five months already
Any problem following suit?
Or was that just hollow fact-free slander aimed at gullible people?
If you get any credible proof you've succeeded, you're still going to Gitmo for the rest of your life.
Of course not! When you succeed hacking the DHS:
- If you didn’t get caught, you sell your data to Russia as usual for a rather large reward.
- If you did get caught, you explain that this was for the bug hunt and submit your findings to the DHS for a much smaller reward.
I don’t understand the math, here. The sourced “article” (it’s more of an advertorial, really) affirms: - salaries upwards of $100,000 a year - 80% say more than 1 hour per week, which could equate $88,000 per year. - 8% say more than 5 hours per week, which could equate $400,000 per year. - up to to 12.5% of investment squandered.
At the risk of making a fool out of myself: - $100,000 per year is about $50 per hour, isn’t it? - 80% staff spending 1 hour per week (50 hours per year) would then cost an average of $2000 per employee per year, not $88,000. - 8% staff spending 5 hours per week (250 hours per year) would then cost an average of $1000 per employee per year, not $400,000. - 8% staff spending 5 hours per week (12.5% of the work week) and the remaining 72% spending 1 hour per week (2.5% of the work week) would represent an average of 2.8% of investment squandered, not 12.5%.
Naturally, to measure the true loss, you’d also have to deduct the costs saved from not asking the regular IT staff to do the job, and also the gains obtained from the immediate increase in productivity resulting from the security staff’s intervention.
Of course, the article is thinly disguised advertisement for some “automation solutions available that help them keep their day-to-day work”, so accuracy may not be paramount, compared to shock value
...this kind of parasitic behaviour could give a boost to VoIP, where you can freely manage your phone line and voice-mail, complete with IVR (menu prompts) that help dodge robocalls (“press 5 to leave a message”), and custom filters (e.g., allow the local school to leave robocall messages without prompting, but not others; etc.).
But, to be honest, I doubt that this has much chance to pass. Not that they care about consumers. But imagine how businesses will react to the prospect of having employee voice-mailboxes filled to the brim with spam?
I’d like to see if newer DJI products shipping with the new firmware will have a notice prominently displayed that clearly discloses to prospective buyers that they will have to register and submit personal information in order to operate the craft. I’d hope for legal requirements to that effect.
Moreover, there really should be no need to disclose personal information in order to download geo-fencing data. Yet, I can see how they’d play on that idea to “justify” the crippling of operational range. On the other hand, disabling video streaming for those who fail to register... That speaks volumes about DJI’s real intentions!
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. The issues you mentioned are greatly interesting, of course, but they relate either to debatable policy choices or to contentious uncertainties that require more information. On the other hand, this article is about a high-magnitude flawed calculation: a tangible, rational, non-partisan indicator of competence and trustworthiness (or lack thereof), grounded in arithmetic. Wouldn’t that appeal to nerds everywhere?
Slashdot Mirror
If this pans out, the Middle East problems will become largely irrelevant, outside the Middle East. And Saudi Arabia will revert to what it always was.
I’m not so sure about that. There is more at stake in the region than just oil revenue, like competing regional influence (with military benefits), mass migrations, exportable terrorism and, of course, the Israel-Arab conflict in which the U.S. has always been knee deep. Turning the region into a resourceless dump of poverty is unlikely to improve things for anyone. If coal country here in the U.S. can effortlessly swing to radical extremes because their outdated jobs have gone away, think of what’s likely to happen in the Middle-East when it’s their turn. It would probably be smart to help them to a soft landing and rebound to better opportunities.
Developing the technologies enabling telepathy will take precisely eight years.
Developing accurate project scheduling techniques will take at least another two thousand years.
Evolving the capability of honest disclosure of accurate project schedules to a pressing venture capitalist will take... Huh, well, that will happen shortly after the second coming, I promise!
There's just so much bullshit anymore it's nearly impossible to accept anything as fact unless it's witnessed first hand.
Quite the opposite. What you witness first hand is a tiny sliver of information that you, as an involved observer, are likely to misinterpret or misunderstand; a mere anecdote that is unlikely to represent any large trend capable of enlightening you much about reality, especially in regard to societal issues. In fact, refusing information other than that directly seen is likely to turn you into an ignorant narrow-minded and yet easily-fooled individual. Ironically, it is for people like you that journalists now focus on serving short videos of “first-hand witness news” (really, unimportant anecdotes) rather than going into detailed, balanced, well-reasoned and well-contextualised explanations based on a large body of observations.
Anything any governmental body says is garbage, and anything the entertainment media says about it is even more garbage just decorated with spin.
Such generalisation and hyperbole is entirely gratuitous and deserves about as much scorn as you are displaying toward governmental institutions and the press at large.
...but they’re held back by some unresolved incompatibility that causes Harpoon to crash on Windows Vista.
Are you complaining about the topic as being too insignificant to deserve an article (as in: no need to tell people that they way want to update their servers) or are you preemptively commenting that other readers shouldn’t bother to comment on such an insignificant topic?
putting something in the atmosphere to reflect more sunlight back out into space
Yes, clearly, our current troubles are caused by the sun, so let’s just decrease the solar energy we receive.
Of course, this could have some adverse consequences on photosynthesis and also on solar energy production, but we can always compensate the latter by burning some more fossil fuel.
If you are into alternative medicine that involves the “manipulation of muscle tissue and bones”, I’d suggest seeing a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.) rather than a quack chiropractor. I’m not a fan of osteopathy but, at least, that field has properly educated medical doctors (the aforementioned D.O.s): in the U.S., those are normal physicians with an added specialisation in osteopathy, and they will therefore have the ability to use the gamut of modern medicine like any physician. (On the other hand, I’d suggest avoiding the non-D.O. plain “osteopaths”, who are not physicians.)
- Streamlined penal code
Article 1: ”it is illegal to do things that a police officer finds reprehensible”.
The end.
Having ambiguous laws that effectively leave most of the decision to the discretion of law enforcement is a great way to confuse everybody, signal that those laws are not that important, make police jobs more difficult, increase the risk of corruption, and foster resentment and suspicion of double standards.
Hey, lawmakers, how about doing your job?
Correct me if I’m wrong but if I have malware on my machine that’s capable of starting up my web browser in headless mode (a.k.a. arbitrary executable), well I probably have much more serious issues to address ASAP!
Install a wall, a really big (but beautiful) firewall.
Make sure that it is fully paid for by those on the other side.
At the firewall’s gate, deploy a large number of DHS-bots that will carefully inspect every single incoming packet, asking for their domain of residency, destination, MAC address where they intend to stay; question their purpose for coming, especially whether they are coming for pimping or terrorist activities; detect any involvement with social media accounts (and obtain associated passwords); and ascertain their true position on net neutrality. Discard any bits of raw meat or soil. Turn back any packets that profess disagreeable beliefs or are framed funny. In case of doubt, call IPSec immediately.
For outgoing packets, launch TSA processes instead to perform deep packet inspection. At that stage, it is customary to lose no more than 10% of the packets.
For extra security (at the expense of some performance), perform all networking purely within OSI model layers 8 (the convolution layer) and 9 (the administrative redundancy layer). You can regain some of the performance by connecting your Raspberry Pis in parallel rather than in series.
They can make nuclear bombs and chemical weapons (among other things) so, regarding military technology, they’re clearly more advanced than many other countries.
Additionally, if there is something that’s comparatively inexpensive, and does not require procuring tightly-watched materials, it’s cyber-hacking. So it’s clearly the ideal tool for a small nation with limited means, and it’s only logical that they would invest heavily into it. Not only for geopolitical purposes, but even for cash, which they try to get by any means, including criminal operations (well, they probably justify those as “moral” when conducted against the “enemy”).
Overall, I find it entirely logical and even likely that they would jump on any actionable information released by Wikileaks (and others) and quickly exploit it. They are fascist and poor, but that does not make them dummies.
I thought it would be easy to get them to collaborate but none of them -- zero -- chose to cooperate.
This lack of cooperation from the designer should in fact be a requirement for allowing their artifact in the museum.
It is the surest sign that it really does belong there.
the Federal Trade Commission has started to collect public comments on this issue
Sure, because this thorny problem is likely to generate many conflicting opinions. For example, there will be those who adamantly oppose voice mail spamming. Then, there will be those who instead express disgust and outrage at the prospect of voice mail spamming. Those opinions will be countered by yet others who will choose to say that voice mail spamming is merely a gross abuse of private resources. Oh, yes, and then, there will be the dead people, the bots and the spammers themselves.
It doesn’t matter that in 1991, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (signed by President George H. W. Bush), reinforced in 2005 by the Junk Fax Prevention Act, had outlawed junk faxes, which are essentially the same thing as junk voice mail, only differing in the medium used (printed page versus computer memory). Noooooo, this is clearly all different, and we obviously need a national reflection on this delicate and quite novel topic.
Because, you never know... We may well find that the prevailing majority of opinions came from the bots.
I tend to agree but it’s not easy to change. Technically, the internet (as I understand it) is just a bunch of interconnected networks, all sending and receiving data. By that standard, we should all be running our own little networks, complete with all the services that we need: DNS, AAA, mail, VoIP, VPN, web, etc., and also the applications that we want: media serving, short message (Tweet-style) publishing, etc. At that point, sites like YouTube or Twitter would only be used either as aggregators (specialised search engines and directories, finding stuff on our servers and linking to it) and as CDNs (for increased performance, if desired by us). The problem (as I see it) is that, instead, the internet has really become more like a giant local network: a bunch of pure clients (consumers) connected to servers (a.k.a. the cloud), with the peculiarity that those servers on the network are run by administrators that are unrelated to each other and to the clients, and who only have their own interest at heart.
To regain some freedom, people would need to be able to serve data freely and effectively. And, right now, most of them cannot, for various reasons:
I don’t see this changing anytime soon, for several reasons:
Yeah, and I love how those futuristic designs always seem to magically solve all problems with some future key technology that is just about to be ready, so do not worry about anything, dear investors.
Well, if they have a fantastic AI that can “predict malfunctions and other problems”, why don’t they commercialise it right now, for use in crewed ships, to “help reduce the number of maritime incidents” right now? And if they don’t have it right now, why don’t they start there and wait till they have it ready, demonstrated and deployed on crewed ships, before selling us an automation pipe dream?
For crying out loud, they’re talking about autonomous airliners and ships while they’re not even yet able to track airliners that go missing over the ocean!
It won’t need to. After all, what are the pirates going to do, once they are on the deck of an automated ship? Start yelling at the main computer angry threats of rebooting it unless it changes course?
I think that it is a good thing for search engines to index information behind paywalls, or any other “obstruction” (for example content of printed books): that would bring us closer to a universal search tool. With paywalls, it could be done using special credentials provided to search engines by the publisher (assuming that a standard gets developed for that). That would solve the problem of the search engine downranking articles for only seeing fragments of them.
On the other hand, I’d want those same search engines to make it easy (through settings) for users to include or exclude such information (by category: paywalled, books, etc.) from the results of their search, with customisable exceptions (for example, a user might want to include results from a firewalled journal to which he subscribes but not others).
No, the question was rhetorical and rather uninformed. In peacetime, one obviously does not casually bomb a country for interfering in elections. And it’s perfectly appropriate not to play armchair diplomat and to instead rely on the executive (particularly, the Dept. of State) to come up with an appropriate response. There is a rather well-practised escalation procedure for such cases, and it does not start at “bomb”.
My goodness, so much proven criminal corruption!
Fortunately, those horrible crooked corrupt liars guilty of criminal acts are facing the merciless might of implacable yet righteous enemies: the Republican party and Donald Trump, who now fully control all facets of the federal government and therefore have complete freedom to carry out Trump’s campaign promise: that those crooked corrupt liars are going to jail! Drain the swamp! Yeah!
So Well, what are they waiting for, huh? It’s been five months already
Any problem following suit?
Or was that just hollow fact-free slander aimed at gullible people?
If you get any credible proof you've succeeded, you're still going to Gitmo for the rest of your life.
Of course not! When you succeed hacking the DHS:
- If you didn’t get caught, you sell your data to Russia as usual for a rather large reward.
- If you did get caught, you explain that this was for the bug hunt and submit your findings to the DHS for a much smaller reward.
It’s not Google’s fault. They tried to honour the government’s request, they really did.
It went like this:
“Google Assistant, what are the wages of female employees versus those of male employees at Google?”
“I’m sorry, Sundar, I’m afraid I can’t do that, it would be too expensive and burdensome to produce.”
I don’t understand the math, here. The sourced “article” (it’s more of an advertorial, really) affirms:
- salaries upwards of $100,000 a year
- 80% say more than 1 hour per week, which could equate $88,000 per year.
- 8% say more than 5 hours per week, which could equate $400,000 per year.
- up to to 12.5% of investment squandered.
At the risk of making a fool out of myself:
- $100,000 per year is about $50 per hour, isn’t it?
- 80% staff spending 1 hour per week (50 hours per year) would then cost an average of $2000 per employee per year, not $88,000.
- 8% staff spending 5 hours per week (250 hours per year) would then cost an average of $1000 per employee per year, not $400,000.
- 8% staff spending 5 hours per week (12.5% of the work week) and the remaining 72% spending 1 hour per week (2.5% of the work week) would represent an average of 2.8% of investment squandered, not 12.5%.
Naturally, to measure the true loss, you’d also have to deduct the costs saved from not asking the regular IT staff to do the job, and also the gains obtained from the immediate increase in productivity resulting from the security staff’s intervention.
Of course, the article is thinly disguised advertisement for some “automation solutions available that help them keep their day-to-day work”, so accuracy may not be paramount, compared to shock value
...this kind of parasitic behaviour could give a boost to VoIP, where you can freely manage your phone line and voice-mail, complete with IVR (menu prompts) that help dodge robocalls (“press 5 to leave a message”), and custom filters (e.g., allow the local school to leave robocall messages without prompting, but not others; etc.).
But, to be honest, I doubt that this has much chance to pass. Not that they care about consumers. But imagine how businesses will react to the prospect of having employee voice-mailboxes filled to the brim with spam?
I’d like to see if newer DJI products shipping with the new firmware will have a notice prominently displayed that clearly discloses to prospective buyers that they will have to register and submit personal information in order to operate the craft. I’d hope for legal requirements to that effect.
Moreover, there really should be no need to disclose personal information in order to download geo-fencing data. Yet, I can see how they’d play on that idea to “justify” the crippling of operational range. On the other hand, disabling video streaming for those who fail to register... That speaks volumes about DJI’s real intentions!
I’m not sure I’d agree with that. The issues you mentioned are greatly interesting, of course, but they relate either to debatable policy choices or to contentious uncertainties that require more information.
On the other hand, this article is about a high-magnitude flawed calculation: a tangible, rational, non-partisan indicator of competence and trustworthiness (or lack thereof), grounded in arithmetic. Wouldn’t that appeal to nerds everywhere?