The nature of consciousness is a very interesting problem to study. The question in the headline is not asked seriously, but for a purpose in the larger discussion.
Pay attention to what the scientists involved in the discussion are talking about (and ignore the philosophers... they need to learn some more math and quantum mechanics). Is the universe deterministic? How many independent decision makers can co-exist simultaneously? In physics, we understand the bounds of these questions, but can't answer them yet. The concept of particles as independent actors is an extension of allowing multiple interacting consciousnesses to an absurd limit. It's presented by physicists as a mathematically impossible situation, to demonstrate that there will be some limit or law on what can be conscious. Having one consciousness in the universe is appealing to the way physicists think.
I agree that the ways they've approached this so far have been pretty dumb. Opening the design process is trivial. Opening the fab process is not. From an industry point of view (my point of view), opening the process completely is not necessary. I simply need to be able to validate the manufacturing process, which means it needs to be open to me (the customer). Many electronics manufacturers don't understand that "I need to validate" is not the same as "you validate for me." For chip fab, that's going to require that I have a lot of access to facilities and records that fabs generally don't show to customers. DARPA's major problem is that this is an innovation needed in business relationships and pricing models, not technology.
DARPA had (has?) a program to try and figure out how to ensure the computer hardware DoD is purchasing is what is actually being delivered. There are more problems with hardware than simply design and the cost of buying fab time. Validation that the design was produced correctly is not trivial in complex hardware. Opening the whole process would help solve that problem, and the DoD may have the deep pockets necessary to pay for actual hardware builds.
Brown deserves much more credit than he's getting for instituting more grown-up government (temperamentally and fiscally) than we've had in the last few decades. What he's done financially for the state is frankly amazing.
That doesn't set aside the large poverty growth in rural California or the abuse of local governments (municipalities, water districts, and schools) by Sacramento. Much of the extra revenue Brown has generated came from simply keeping the money the state tax collector gathered on behalf of local governments.
The way the state government responded to the drought did not help. Brown accelerated the pattern of Sacramento seizing local resources and redistributing to the state, which necessarily means the population centers. This is a practice that Wilson and Arnold also encouraged, and something that probably needed to be done during the past few droughts. There are places in the state with ruined agricultural economies who are still paying off bonds for infrastructure they had to give up to the state.
The "statewide" infrastructure plans going back to before Wilson's years routinely ignore all of California north of the Bay Area, and that's continuing.It's a complete fabrication to say California's issue stems from a liberal government ignoring conservatives. Both sides have ignored the (liberal) areas of rural northern California, and that region is very reliably pro-independence.
So, I agree that Brown has done a very good job, that California's peculiar version of austerity seems to have worked, and that this doomed effort to split the state is clearly driven by some conservative agenda. However, it's a mistake (political, moral, human...) to simply ignore the people in the state with valid complaints about the way they are governed.
Of course you should teach kids stuff like this; it's 100 year old science. At some point kids need to be learning these concepts or the weight of science that needs to be learned as an adult will be too large.
I would start with a small adaptation of the description that Einstein uses to describe relativity to non-scientists:
When you're in a car, and you speed up, what do you feel? What do you feel when it stops? Imagine you're in a car (or roller coaster, or rocket ship) that is always speeding up really, really strongly, all the time. You could speed up so much that the back of the car (roller coaster, rocket ship) feels just like the ground. You could even stand up like it was the floor. Einstein is famous for figuring out that if that happens, the back of the car really is just like the ground. People used to think it was just a trick or a coincidence, but it turns out there's no difference, actually. That changed a lot of what people thought about science.
If the kid understands that, give them a good translation of Einstein's book to read.
For most people in creative positions, time and money are interchangeable. Often it's not easy to see how that exchange works, but it's usually there.
You generally have as much time as there is money to support you until further investment isn't justified.
The flip is when you're working for yourself. In that situation you have as much time as you want, but you will receive no money until you've come up with something of value to someone else.
All the project management, management, reviews, and other similar stuff is just there to figure out exactly how to optimize and clarify this trade off (for other people, not for you).
I understand wanting to call people out when they say unreasonable things. But in this case, you're asking someone to source something that is well documented and that you could very easily search for yourself. If you want to call people out for saying ridiculous things, you need to first actually verify that what they're saying is ridiculous. Maybe simply check and see if someone has pointed out a bias you didn't know about. A very cursory amount of research online will reveal that yes, Twitter generally has a liberal bias. If you're actually interested in the topic, go in depth and read the academic papers, they're out there for you to find.
I also can't help but point out that Trump's account is "famous" because he's the president, not because he dominates twitter. His actual following is less than half of Obama's. More people on Twitter are interested in what Shakira has to say than Donald Trump. Again, feel free to go look all that up yourself.
The real point is: So what? The OP didn't say there was a problem that Twitter has a bias. You're the one who seems to think it's a problem. The rest of us just see that as a data point in the discussion about whether their crackdown on bots is reasonable. On that subject, Mother Jones has a great article laying out the case that allowing bots in online communication is bad for democracy. I hope you understand that Mother Jones has a very well established liberal bias.
The most successful independent developer CNET interviewed made about $30k off his two skills over a one year period (not a steady $9k/month).
The low end of independent skill writing was some amazon server credit for two years of work.
The high end of paid skill writing was $100k for a skill, and that's for the guy who worked on developing Alexa and left to start a company writing skills for companies wanting smart advertisements on the system. The low end of paid skill writing was $300 with a $100/month upkeep fee.
Much is made of the $9000/month (!!!!) the independent guy brought in briefly, but the best money here is in writing the smart advertisements for a set fee.
I'm pretty sure the doctors, nurses, medical equipment manufacturers, drug manufacturers, disposable sterile supply manufacturers, various supply distributors, etc. are all part of some sort of organization (even as small as a family) that expects to turn a profit.
The healthcare system in the US is not cost effective, private (about 2/3 of our healthcare costs are paid by the government), nor particularly "better" than any other reasonable alternative. The US government pays more per-person for healthcare than the Canadian government. If we switched to the Canadian system right now, at the same billing rates, our government spend on healthcare would go down.
The US healthcare system is a very sizable chunk of the economy. Telling all the US doctors, manufacturers, distributors, medical lawyers, etc that they will only get paid what people in, say Canada or Germany, make in the equivalent jobs would unfortunately create a sizable drop in our overall economy. At root, this is why we're not able to actually fix things.
There are a lot of vocal people who didn't like the movie, that's ok.
I really liked it. I go for Space Cowboy Wizards, and that's what we got. If you're just now realizing that Star Wars lacks realism and internal consistency in physical, moral, or metaphysical laws, I don't know what to tell you.
Maybe you're just figuring out that Star Wars is a vehicle for subtle counter culture messaging.
Maybe it's funny for Yoda to scrounge for cookies in Luke's pack while making odd grunting noises, but you don't want Luke milking a walrus with a goofy look on his face.
We watch a lot of Star Wars in my house, and all this has been going on the whole time. Maybe you just hated how this iteration was done. That's fine.
I liked it. My kids liked it, and my kids's grandparents liked it. Rogue 1 didn't end up fitting in with the rest of what "Star Wars" is today, and it's not part of the "Star Wars" conversation with the people I build Star Wars legos with at home. Episodes 4-7, Clone Wars and Rebels are on all time around here. I expect 8 will join the rotation when it's available. It is Star Wars; it fits in.
My biggest complaint is that Episode 8 was too long. I nearly got peed on by the end. I think that's what Disney is going for. Kids in the theater for Star Wars should rather pee on a parent than miss a minute of the movie.
I like the part of the article where they mention how the established players in the consumer contact lens market have the same issues.
These guys don't deserve this article, they're just distributing mid-tier (but real, and FDA approved) contact lenses with colorful packaging. Let's have some more investigation into the startups peddling anti-aging pills and diet drinks.
There is no gray zone in sexual harassment. If you think you're in a gray zone, you've fucked up already. This has been covered in sexual harassment training for at least a generation now. Let's actually try to get it right this time.
There is one way, and only one way to act at work, and that is professional. If you're being "friendly" with co-workers, you're doing this wrong. (Customer oriented "friendliness" is good... do we need to go over why there's a difference?)
If you're a man, you are seen as powerful whether you are or not. Figure your shit out, and get more friends outside of work if you need to. If you're a woman, it's a good idea to start thinking along these lines. If men are going to adopt stricter professionalism, acting differently will get you labeled "unprofessional."
In general, this is not going to make advancement easier for women. There are different social rules being emphasized, and this is going to bias men towards trusting other men. There's a new value signalling language being developed right now. It's being developed by the people in power, and if you don't learn it fast, you're not going to be joining them.
If you're hearing things like "people need to fit into the company culture," know that that is a dog-whistle for lawyers to come sue your company. That is the old language. This is a big change and quickly moving. "Company culture" is a real thing, and is actually important to the success of a business. It is also understood to be the excuse in the last 15 years for a lot of behavior that isn't actually legal. I don't know what's going to replace "culture" as the watchword for whether work groups are well run, but I suspect it's going to be something around professionalism.
I was raised in a (professionally) political family. That meant that as a kid, I understood that it was my parents' job to write or change laws. Laws can change. Some laws are bad. Some laws used to be good, and now aren't. Most of the rules and laws we actually interact with are local. Many more people work on local laws than state or national laws. That's a good place to start.
Next, morality. Your son has good moral instincts. Don't discourage that! Generally, you shouldn't do anything you don't want other people knowing about. If you have to keep it secret to keep being who you want to be, don't do it.
Finally, breaking the rules. Sometimes you find you need to break a rule. You know that something is right, and you don't care what society or the law says about it. In that case, you need to be ready to accept the consequences.
In this case, what are the consequences of violating copyright laws? What are the consequences of violating the school rules? Why are you more willing to violate a federal law than a school rule? (As a parent, I know that my child will be punished for me breaking a school rule. In that situation, I'm also happy to try to take any consequences myself.) These are good lessons on how society actually works.
My best advice to you is that you have your strongest voice as a citizen in local government, which includes your school. Teach your child to engage in a productive way with government by example. Don't simply accept what the government is telling you to do. That's not how our system is supposed to work. The solution here is to get your school to change their rules. Start with a teacher, then the principle, then up from there.
It is not written anywhere in the article, but the video attached to it makes it clear that Apple is talking about the Kardia, not some internal product they're developing.
At first I thought Apple was nefariously trying to drown out news about the Kardia, but no, this is just exceptionally bad reporting.
The problem with Bitcoin is power, and not the political/economic kind of power, but electricity.
As the value increases, more mining hardware is devoted to Bitcoin and more power is used to process the transactions. The complexity of the transactions increases automatically as more hardware is available. Adding more hardware or decreasing the cost of electricity doesn't lower the value of Bitcoin, it adds to the value. This is opposite of the way scarce commodities like gold work. We're to a point now where this infrastructure growth is being taken to an extreme.
It probably costs over 200 kWh and rising to process a Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin value is now somewhat tied to the cost of electricity in China (or other places that have the combination of computing infrastructure and low cost power to process transactions at large scale).
If all you're doing is financial modeling this sounds great (really great!). However, this value is dependent on access to large scale infrastructure that itself depends on multiple governments and power utilities (whether or not the governments and utilities acknowledge it or even realize it). It's a lot easier to centralize, tax, regulate, and dismantle when transactions require so much power.
Bitcoin won't go away if infrastructure is removed, the value will just tank for a few years and a bubble will start again.
So now leveraging a buy-out offer from Facebook to get an inflated IPO is a principled stand against... something vague about social media? I thought it was just a desire to make more money.
They have a long way to go before an op-ed like this can be taken seriously. Regardless of their actual intentions, Snapchat made a service that enabled kids to send dirty pics to each other and then rode that wave of skeezy popularity without self-reflection or responsibility for too long to now talk about looking out for their users.
They're doing the same thing with the word "graphene." They've coated glass beads with a few dozen layers of graphite, which is not a new idea, but calling it "graphene" will get it talked about.
Why the anger over this? Are you surprised that we spend a lot on healthcare for old people? This is not a secret.
These statistics are right, and they apply to everyone in the way that statistics generally do. That is, while there are plenty of people who work until they die and incur minimal health care costs, that's not the case for most people.
However, we have built our society so that more money is available to spend on the elderly. People save for their entire lives just to be able to pay for health care at the end of their life. It's why the stock market needs to keep going up, and why we have low inflation.
I think Maury may have some background in fusion research. If not, I do, at least.
The problem is not just money. It's also what the money is being used for: what kind of reactors are being built, what metrics are the government program managers are being sold on, what kinds of scientists are you employing, etc. There is a very big distinction between trying to solve engineering problems and physics problems.
ITER, and other reactor designs solve engineering problems, and try to answer the question "can we build a reactor with these specific plasma properties?" The physics questions are a lot more open ended, and any physics project has a much higher chance of failure than an engineering project.
I said I have some background in fusion. I worked on DIII-D which is a large fusion reactor run by General Atomics. Back then, I was probably best described as a computational physicist, now I'm a condensed matter physicist. I got into condensed matter physics because of my work on DIII-D. There were a lot of fusion scientists about 30 years ago who argued strenuously against building bigger and more expensive reactors. Instead, they argued we needed to focus on developing better components for the reactor designs we already have. That idea became IFMIF - a facility to test materials for fusion reactor use (fusion science likes these monolithic large projects - easier to fund, but they are SLOW). ITER was made the funding and marketing priority over IFMIF. Now, we're into engineering design on the system after ITER (DEMO), which requires input from IFMIF... which is still not built. So once again, we will go build an incredibly expensive reactor while using materials we know will not work in a commercial system because we're not willing to prioritize solving the physics problems. So, we can go on like this building reactors for a very long time without making real progress, and spend a lot of money along the way.
This Helium bubble stuff is interesting, but it's not a driving consideration. This is the kind of small project they've thrown to the materials folks to keep enough people involved until IFMIF is built.
I think a lot of the comments here are from PhD scientists who have seen what the real job market is like.
You may want to look into what the actual STEM job market is like in Europe, and how things like actual visa and tax policies compare. The EU is not a great place to be a scientist.
Now, I'll give you that Canada is actually pretty awesome when it comes to STEM friendly policies. So is South Korea, Australia, and Singapore. The best than can be said about all these places is that they only train twice as many people every year as there are job openings.
The easy fix for this is for the universities to stop charging tuition to people who are actually employees.
For the universities, the tuition does not go to cover research costs, overhead, or teaching costs, it's just an extra fee they charge to launder a bit of money from research to the general fund.
If you do the math on this, a company is allowed to charge a 7% fee on grants, while universities charge tuition instead. $150k grant/contract covers a project employing one fully burdened researcher (grad student or non-PhD industry scientist). On that grant, the company would take $10,500 of profit and the university takes $50,000. If the scientist employed happens to be on a visa, the difference is even more extreme... because... tradition? I've never tried to claim extra legal costs for employing international scientists on my industry grant proposals, maybe I'm missing out.
Just to be super clear what a rip-off this is for grad researchers, that difference in fee vs tuition is just about the difference in salaries for those two positions. This is one of those rare cases where extra money in the corporate budget goes to the employee.
In any case, if you're a grad student facing this new tax, ask your university regents or trustees why they're charging you tuition at all. You can skip your PI, they're already on board with getting rid of tuition.
This is the confusing part of politics today. "Long-standing" and "right now" are really quite different. Regardless of whether you think Barney Frank or George Bush is really responsible for the critical policy, the liberals today are staying away from universal house ownership with a 10 foot pole.
The NY Times had a great summary of the policies that led to the housing bubble. It's an easy article to find. I think Bush removing the requirement for down payments was key... but other views are valid.
I also definitely agree with you that conservatives hated fannie and freddy, but those types of conservatives are now essentially invisible in government. It's not just the definition of "progressive" that has changed. Most of this thread is about how today's "progressive" politicians may or may not be advocating for feudalism, which is highly entertaining. To be fair, I don't look at proposals from "conservatives" in power today and recognize anything I would have considered "conservative" 20 years ago.
Have you been to Manhattan, San Francisco, Silicon Valley - they so-called havens of the progressives? They are far more segregated, stratified, with their high castles inaccessible to the common citizens, compared to the South, for example.
Have you? These aren't liberal havens...
This is a joke, right? You're joking. OP made some ridiculous statements made about cities and segregation, and you're going to argue with the part that describes these cities as liberal havens?
How could you miss the voting maps the rest of us have pored over for the last year?
Slashdot Mirror
The nature of consciousness is a very interesting problem to study. The question in the headline is not asked seriously, but for a purpose in the larger discussion.
Pay attention to what the scientists involved in the discussion are talking about (and ignore the philosophers... they need to learn some more math and quantum mechanics). Is the universe deterministic? How many independent decision makers can co-exist simultaneously? In physics, we understand the bounds of these questions, but can't answer them yet. The concept of particles as independent actors is an extension of allowing multiple interacting consciousnesses to an absurd limit. It's presented by physicists as a mathematically impossible situation, to demonstrate that there will be some limit or law on what can be conscious. Having one consciousness in the universe is appealing to the way physicists think.
I agree that the ways they've approached this so far have been pretty dumb. Opening the design process is trivial. Opening the fab process is not. From an industry point of view (my point of view), opening the process completely is not necessary. I simply need to be able to validate the manufacturing process, which means it needs to be open to me (the customer). Many electronics manufacturers don't understand that "I need to validate" is not the same as "you validate for me." For chip fab, that's going to require that I have a lot of access to facilities and records that fabs generally don't show to customers. DARPA's major problem is that this is an innovation needed in business relationships and pricing models, not technology.
DARPA had (has?) a program to try and figure out how to ensure the computer hardware DoD is purchasing is what is actually being delivered. There are more problems with hardware than simply design and the cost of buying fab time. Validation that the design was produced correctly is not trivial in complex hardware. Opening the whole process would help solve that problem, and the DoD may have the deep pockets necessary to pay for actual hardware builds.
Brown deserves much more credit than he's getting for instituting more grown-up government (temperamentally and fiscally) than we've had in the last few decades. What he's done financially for the state is frankly amazing.
That doesn't set aside the large poverty growth in rural California or the abuse of local governments (municipalities, water districts, and schools) by Sacramento. Much of the extra revenue Brown has generated came from simply keeping the money the state tax collector gathered on behalf of local governments.
The way the state government responded to the drought did not help. Brown accelerated the pattern of Sacramento seizing local resources and redistributing to the state, which necessarily means the population centers. This is a practice that Wilson and Arnold also encouraged, and something that probably needed to be done during the past few droughts. There are places in the state with ruined agricultural economies who are still paying off bonds for infrastructure they had to give up to the state.
The "statewide" infrastructure plans going back to before Wilson's years routinely ignore all of California north of the Bay Area, and that's continuing.It's a complete fabrication to say California's issue stems from a liberal government ignoring conservatives. Both sides have ignored the (liberal) areas of rural northern California, and that region is very reliably pro-independence.
So, I agree that Brown has done a very good job, that California's peculiar version of austerity seems to have worked, and that this doomed effort to split the state is clearly driven by some conservative agenda. However, it's a mistake (political, moral, human...) to simply ignore the people in the state with valid complaints about the way they are governed.
Of course you should teach kids stuff like this; it's 100 year old science. At some point kids need to be learning these concepts or the weight of science that needs to be learned as an adult will be too large.
I would start with a small adaptation of the description that Einstein uses to describe relativity to non-scientists:
When you're in a car, and you speed up, what do you feel? What do you feel when it stops? Imagine you're in a car (or roller coaster, or rocket ship) that is always speeding up really, really strongly, all the time. You could speed up so much that the back of the car (roller coaster, rocket ship) feels just like the ground. You could even stand up like it was the floor. Einstein is famous for figuring out that if that happens, the back of the car really is just like the ground. People used to think it was just a trick or a coincidence, but it turns out there's no difference, actually. That changed a lot of what people thought about science.
If the kid understands that, give them a good translation of Einstein's book to read.
For most people in creative positions, time and money are interchangeable. Often it's not easy to see how that exchange works, but it's usually there.
You generally have as much time as there is money to support you until further investment isn't justified.
The flip is when you're working for yourself. In that situation you have as much time as you want, but you will receive no money until you've come up with something of value to someone else.
All the project management, management, reviews, and other similar stuff is just there to figure out exactly how to optimize and clarify this trade off (for other people, not for you).
I understand wanting to call people out when they say unreasonable things. But in this case, you're asking someone to source something that is well documented and that you could very easily search for yourself. If you want to call people out for saying ridiculous things, you need to first actually verify that what they're saying is ridiculous. Maybe simply check and see if someone has pointed out a bias you didn't know about. A very cursory amount of research online will reveal that yes, Twitter generally has a liberal bias. If you're actually interested in the topic, go in depth and read the academic papers, they're out there for you to find.
I also can't help but point out that Trump's account is "famous" because he's the president, not because he dominates twitter. His actual following is less than half of Obama's. More people on Twitter are interested in what Shakira has to say than Donald Trump. Again, feel free to go look all that up yourself.
The real point is: So what? The OP didn't say there was a problem that Twitter has a bias. You're the one who seems to think it's a problem. The rest of us just see that as a data point in the discussion about whether their crackdown on bots is reasonable. On that subject, Mother Jones has a great article laying out the case that allowing bots in online communication is bad for democracy. I hope you understand that Mother Jones has a very well established liberal bias.
It's useful to think about the real numbers here:
The most successful independent developer CNET interviewed made about $30k off his two skills over a one year period (not a steady $9k/month).
The low end of independent skill writing was some amazon server credit for two years of work.
The high end of paid skill writing was $100k for a skill, and that's for the guy who worked on developing Alexa and left to start a company writing skills for companies wanting smart advertisements on the system. The low end of paid skill writing was $300 with a $100/month upkeep fee.
Much is made of the $9000/month (!!!!) the independent guy brought in briefly, but the best money here is in writing the smart advertisements for a set fee.
I'm pretty sure the doctors, nurses, medical equipment manufacturers, drug manufacturers, disposable sterile supply manufacturers, various supply distributors, etc. are all part of some sort of organization (even as small as a family) that expects to turn a profit.
The healthcare system in the US is not cost effective, private (about 2/3 of our healthcare costs are paid by the government), nor particularly "better" than any other reasonable alternative. The US government pays more per-person for healthcare than the Canadian government. If we switched to the Canadian system right now, at the same billing rates, our government spend on healthcare would go down.
The US healthcare system is a very sizable chunk of the economy. Telling all the US doctors, manufacturers, distributors, medical lawyers, etc that they will only get paid what people in, say Canada or Germany, make in the equivalent jobs would unfortunately create a sizable drop in our overall economy. At root, this is why we're not able to actually fix things.
There are a lot of vocal people who didn't like the movie, that's ok.
I really liked it. I go for Space Cowboy Wizards, and that's what we got. If you're just now realizing that Star Wars lacks realism and internal consistency in physical, moral, or metaphysical laws, I don't know what to tell you.
Maybe you're just figuring out that Star Wars is a vehicle for subtle counter culture messaging.
Maybe it's funny for Yoda to scrounge for cookies in Luke's pack while making odd grunting noises, but you don't want Luke milking a walrus with a goofy look on his face.
We watch a lot of Star Wars in my house, and all this has been going on the whole time. Maybe you just hated how this iteration was done. That's fine.
I liked it. My kids liked it, and my kids's grandparents liked it. Rogue 1 didn't end up fitting in with the rest of what "Star Wars" is today, and it's not part of the "Star Wars" conversation with the people I build Star Wars legos with at home. Episodes 4-7, Clone Wars and Rebels are on all time around here. I expect 8 will join the rotation when it's available. It is Star Wars; it fits in.
My biggest complaint is that Episode 8 was too long. I nearly got peed on by the end. I think that's what Disney is going for. Kids in the theater for Star Wars should rather pee on a parent than miss a minute of the movie.
I like the part of the article where they mention how the established players in the consumer contact lens market have the same issues.
These guys don't deserve this article, they're just distributing mid-tier (but real, and FDA approved) contact lenses with colorful packaging. Let's have some more investigation into the startups peddling anti-aging pills and diet drinks.
There is no gray zone in sexual harassment. If you think you're in a gray zone, you've fucked up already. This has been covered in sexual harassment training for at least a generation now. Let's actually try to get it right this time.
There is one way, and only one way to act at work, and that is professional. If you're being "friendly" with co-workers, you're doing this wrong. (Customer oriented "friendliness" is good... do we need to go over why there's a difference?)
If you're a man, you are seen as powerful whether you are or not. Figure your shit out, and get more friends outside of work if you need to. If you're a woman, it's a good idea to start thinking along these lines. If men are going to adopt stricter professionalism, acting differently will get you labeled "unprofessional."
In general, this is not going to make advancement easier for women. There are different social rules being emphasized, and this is going to bias men towards trusting other men. There's a new value signalling language being developed right now. It's being developed by the people in power, and if you don't learn it fast, you're not going to be joining them.
If you're hearing things like "people need to fit into the company culture," know that that is a dog-whistle for lawyers to come sue your company. That is the old language. This is a big change and quickly moving. "Company culture" is a real thing, and is actually important to the success of a business. It is also understood to be the excuse in the last 15 years for a lot of behavior that isn't actually legal. I don't know what's going to replace "culture" as the watchword for whether work groups are well run, but I suspect it's going to be something around professionalism.
I was raised in a (professionally) political family. That meant that as a kid, I understood that it was my parents' job to write or change laws. Laws can change. Some laws are bad. Some laws used to be good, and now aren't. Most of the rules and laws we actually interact with are local. Many more people work on local laws than state or national laws. That's a good place to start.
Next, morality. Your son has good moral instincts. Don't discourage that! Generally, you shouldn't do anything you don't want other people knowing about. If you have to keep it secret to keep being who you want to be, don't do it.
Finally, breaking the rules. Sometimes you find you need to break a rule. You know that something is right, and you don't care what society or the law says about it. In that case, you need to be ready to accept the consequences.
In this case, what are the consequences of violating copyright laws? What are the consequences of violating the school rules? Why are you more willing to violate a federal law than a school rule? (As a parent, I know that my child will be punished for me breaking a school rule. In that situation, I'm also happy to try to take any consequences myself.) These are good lessons on how society actually works.
My best advice to you is that you have your strongest voice as a citizen in local government, which includes your school. Teach your child to engage in a productive way with government by example. Don't simply accept what the government is telling you to do. That's not how our system is supposed to work. The solution here is to get your school to change their rules. Start with a teacher, then the principle, then up from there.
Those calculations and comparisons are out there, just google it. Bitcoin is orders of magnitude more computationally (and energy) intensive.
It is not written anywhere in the article, but the video attached to it makes it clear that Apple is talking about the Kardia, not some internal product they're developing.
At first I thought Apple was nefariously trying to drown out news about the Kardia, but no, this is just exceptionally bad reporting.
The problem with Bitcoin is power, and not the political/economic kind of power, but electricity.
As the value increases, more mining hardware is devoted to Bitcoin and more power is used to process the transactions. The complexity of the transactions increases automatically as more hardware is available. Adding more hardware or decreasing the cost of electricity doesn't lower the value of Bitcoin, it adds to the value. This is opposite of the way scarce commodities like gold work. We're to a point now where this infrastructure growth is being taken to an extreme.
It probably costs over 200 kWh and rising to process a Bitcoin transaction. Bitcoin value is now somewhat tied to the cost of electricity in China (or other places that have the combination of computing infrastructure and low cost power to process transactions at large scale).
If all you're doing is financial modeling this sounds great (really great!). However, this value is dependent on access to large scale infrastructure that itself depends on multiple governments and power utilities (whether or not the governments and utilities acknowledge it or even realize it). It's a lot easier to centralize, tax, regulate, and dismantle when transactions require so much power.
Bitcoin won't go away if infrastructure is removed, the value will just tank for a few years and a bubble will start again.
So now leveraging a buy-out offer from Facebook to get an inflated IPO is a principled stand against ... something vague about social media? I thought it was just a desire to make more money.
They have a long way to go before an op-ed like this can be taken seriously. Regardless of their actual intentions, Snapchat made a service that enabled kids to send dirty pics to each other and then rode that wave of skeezy popularity without self-reflection or responsibility for too long to now talk about looking out for their users.
And now you know what brand extension is.
They're doing the same thing with the word "graphene." They've coated glass beads with a few dozen layers of graphite, which is not a new idea, but calling it "graphene" will get it talked about.
Ah. Evidently these particular finance people are just now discovering ERP systems.
Next, they're going to complain that a monolithic system isn't really flexible enough and they need to move to a cloud based system.
And, hey! Excel integrates with Microsoft's cloud based ERP system. Full circle.
Why the anger over this? Are you surprised that we spend a lot on healthcare for old people? This is not a secret.
These statistics are right, and they apply to everyone in the way that statistics generally do. That is, while there are plenty of people who work until they die and incur minimal health care costs, that's not the case for most people.
However, we have built our society so that more money is available to spend on the elderly. People save for their entire lives just to be able to pay for health care at the end of their life. It's why the stock market needs to keep going up, and why we have low inflation.
I think Maury may have some background in fusion research. If not, I do, at least.
The problem is not just money. It's also what the money is being used for: what kind of reactors are being built, what metrics are the government program managers are being sold on, what kinds of scientists are you employing, etc. There is a very big distinction between trying to solve engineering problems and physics problems.
ITER, and other reactor designs solve engineering problems, and try to answer the question "can we build a reactor with these specific plasma properties?" The physics questions are a lot more open ended, and any physics project has a much higher chance of failure than an engineering project.
I said I have some background in fusion. I worked on DIII-D which is a large fusion reactor run by General Atomics. Back then, I was probably best described as a computational physicist, now I'm a condensed matter physicist. I got into condensed matter physics because of my work on DIII-D. There were a lot of fusion scientists about 30 years ago who argued strenuously against building bigger and more expensive reactors. Instead, they argued we needed to focus on developing better components for the reactor designs we already have. That idea became IFMIF - a facility to test materials for fusion reactor use (fusion science likes these monolithic large projects - easier to fund, but they are SLOW). ITER was made the funding and marketing priority over IFMIF. Now, we're into engineering design on the system after ITER (DEMO), which requires input from IFMIF... which is still not built. So once again, we will go build an incredibly expensive reactor while using materials we know will not work in a commercial system because we're not willing to prioritize solving the physics problems. So, we can go on like this building reactors for a very long time without making real progress, and spend a lot of money along the way.
This Helium bubble stuff is interesting, but it's not a driving consideration. This is the kind of small project they've thrown to the materials folks to keep enough people involved until IFMIF is built.
I think a lot of the comments here are from PhD scientists who have seen what the real job market is like.
You may want to look into what the actual STEM job market is like in Europe, and how things like actual visa and tax policies compare. The EU is not a great place to be a scientist.
Now, I'll give you that Canada is actually pretty awesome when it comes to STEM friendly policies. So is South Korea, Australia, and Singapore. The best than can be said about all these places is that they only train twice as many people every year as there are job openings.
The easy fix for this is for the universities to stop charging tuition to people who are actually employees.
For the universities, the tuition does not go to cover research costs, overhead, or teaching costs, it's just an extra fee they charge to launder a bit of money from research to the general fund.
If you do the math on this, a company is allowed to charge a 7% fee on grants, while universities charge tuition instead. $150k grant/contract covers a project employing one fully burdened researcher (grad student or non-PhD industry scientist). On that grant, the company would take $10,500 of profit and the university takes $50,000. If the scientist employed happens to be on a visa, the difference is even more extreme ... because... tradition? I've never tried to claim extra legal costs for employing international scientists on my industry grant proposals, maybe I'm missing out.
Just to be super clear what a rip-off this is for grad researchers, that difference in fee vs tuition is just about the difference in salaries for those two positions. This is one of those rare cases where extra money in the corporate budget goes to the employee.
In any case, if you're a grad student facing this new tax, ask your university regents or trustees why they're charging you tuition at all. You can skip your PI, they're already on board with getting rid of tuition.
This is the confusing part of politics today. "Long-standing" and "right now" are really quite different. Regardless of whether you think Barney Frank or George Bush is really responsible for the critical policy, the liberals today are staying away from universal house ownership with a 10 foot pole.
The NY Times had a great summary of the policies that led to the housing bubble. It's an easy article to find. I think Bush removing the requirement for down payments was key... but other views are valid.
I also definitely agree with you that conservatives hated fannie and freddy, but those types of conservatives are now essentially invisible in government. It's not just the definition of "progressive" that has changed. Most of this thread is about how today's "progressive" politicians may or may not be advocating for feudalism, which is highly entertaining. To be fair, I don't look at proposals from "conservatives" in power today and recognize anything I would have considered "conservative" 20 years ago.
Have you been to Manhattan, San Francisco, Silicon Valley - they so-called havens of the progressives? They are far more segregated, stratified, with their high castles inaccessible to the common citizens, compared to the South, for example.
Have you? These aren't liberal havens...
This is a joke, right? You're joking. OP made some ridiculous statements made about cities and segregation, and you're going to argue with the part that describes these cities as liberal havens?
How could you miss the voting maps the rest of us have pored over for the last year?