There is always the consideration that lowering the bar tends to increase the caseload and thus, hinder the functioning of the courts, which can cause its own problems.
There may well be a case for changing how standing is determined for certain specific cases like this, but this needs to be work done with a scalpel or you could hopelessly bog down the Federal court system.
No, that isn't justice, it is a bias against the possibility of injustice being worked on the innocent when due process and proper procedure is not employed or there is insufficient evidence.
Justice for the guilty still remains due, we simply hold that it is better for a guilty man to walk free than an innocent man go to jail. Justice has been denied, but we accept the need for that against the possibility of ensuring perfect retaliation for all injust acts, which would allow a much lower standard of evidence and procedure but innocent people would also be punished.
There has always been the assumption by most that even the guilty who get away from the courts unscathed will face justice eventually in some manner. For some, those unrepentant guilty will end up in Hell. For those of a more secular mindset, those who carry out anti-social acts are more likely to end up in a bad way due to their friction with society and their interaction with dangerous people. Justice is frequently served in some manner, although satisfaction of victims can be very hard to ensure in any case.
You are right about the DC Court of Appeals, but the ruling in question is a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is a US Federal Circuit Court of Appeal.
So yes, this is a Circuit court opinion which will be resolved by the Supreme Court on appeal. And they are more likely (although not certain) to hear the appeal if there is a Circuit split involved.
Sweeping may not be the word for it, but it is a very influential decision.
The President can fire any cabinet member at will even those requiring Senate approval. The Senate only comes into play when you try and hire a new cabinet member.
There was a law about firing without Senate approval called the Tenure of Office act, but that was repealed in 1887.
So yes, if he decided to fire an executive branch officer who disobeyed his directives, he totally could.
To be fair, I should have put quotes around "conservative" like I did with "progressive".
As other people have pointed out, I am not describing the parties the way they'd like to be portrayed, or you or I think they should be acting, I'm describing them the way they *are*.
The blame goes to both liberals and conservatives who keep adding size and red tape to the government.
Sure, conservatives want more cops and cop gear. The liberals get upset with cops and their solution is regulating the cops into the ground.
The liberals or "progressives" want to create a whole new social experiment with health care or their plan for ending racism or something. They increase the government to do it. The conservatives oppose this. Their solution? More laws to complicate the implementation of the program, or they just hold up the rest of the government to get their way. In the end, the program still gets implemented, but in some mutant form.
Neither strategy streamlines the government because both sides are statists before they are liberals or conservatives. They believe the government is the solution to the problem, they just disagree on what the problem is.
I don't know what a photon or gravity are, but I didn't say I did. I am saying that both investigations are still the subject of science, which they certainly are.
One question that is almost certainly philosophical is the quest to be able to describe a deity. That's almost certainly philosophical because the subject itself, by definition, has the power to avoid measurement if he wishes. While such a being could decide to demonstrate miracles in an rigorously controlled experiment to prove his capabilities, so far, no deity has stepped forward to do so.
You are confusing answering difficult questions with "philosophy". It may be that the answers will only ever be philosophical due to our inability to measure anything related to gravity or photons, but we're certainly not that far enough along yet to even suggest that we can know that. There are plenty of things that are waiting to be measured.
I can certainly be wrong, but I'm not the one insisting that it is a subject for philosophy only.
As I said, if we determine, after investigation, that we cannot measure gravity, then it is a matter of philosophy. We're not even close to that point yet.
I do have to admit, I do wonder about some of these projects.
Still, I think their actual goal is to cater to people who might have more access to a 3-D printer than a doctor, so presumably the value is in the instructions on how to conduct and properly evaluate tests, not the actual speculums.
Since this is LGBTQ-related, I am guessing that they have trouble finding doctors to serve them more often, rather than poverty itself being the major issue. The thing about Mumbai was to illustrate the value of simplified testing to a certain underserved grouping. As usual, the summary was somewhat deceptive.
An actual fusion plant (not holding my breath here) would be able to generate base load much more efficiently than either wind or solar and in any location you can think of. They could also be built anywhere you want to put them, reducing the issues with transmission.
There's definitely a place for it, and that place is to definitively replace fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
Not necessarily. The scientific method by itself does none of those things by itself. To do those things, you have to apply that method to unanswered questions which you can suggest a hypothesis for.
If you don't have a question to ask, you don't have a hypothesis to falsify. Science isn't equivalent to exploration.
What gravity is is certainly not philosophy. Why would you even think that?
Gravity has a cause and a mechanism for how it does what it does which is currently undiscovered. Science should certainly be able to discover both of those unless such a thing is impossible due to physical limitations on what we can measure. Then, and only then, would speculation on the causes and mechanism of gravity be more philosophy than science.
I think the idea is to actually teach students where we have gaps in our ability to explain things.
There are many things that are taken to be scientific facts which are anything but proven, and you'd know that if you asked certain experts in the fields.
The problem is that many of us assume that we collectively know more than we actually do, and it gives students the incorrect idea that there is nothing more to be learned, or that they will be doing relatively trivial research. In that sense, we need to explain where the frontiers are, and some of them are hiding in places we didn't expect them to be.
It's not really a course on being ignorant, it is a course to help students to learn where to start looking to find unsolved mysteries.
Such a course would be hugely important because it allows us to discover more questions to answer as well as giving some motivation to those who might otherwise be bored or disheartened by the lack of a frontier.
Don't be ridiculous. Even if they were an actual crime family, most real crime families only oppose something until they can control and profit from it. If Texas goes solar and they control Texas, then they can very well benefit from solar.
Oil companies have been re-branding themselves as "energy companies" for years now. Don't think for a moment that they don't want solar and that is motivating their actions. What they don't want is to be left behind because of their legacy investments in oil/gas/coal extraction. They have significant investments in fossil fuel extraction, but don't think for a moment that they won't simply buy up the solar capacity when it comes time to do so. They may even support it, at some point.
If anything energy companies are being held back by the fact that there is a significant demand for gasoline and other oil products that will not be going anywhere even if we power the grid 100% with solar. They have significant investments in oil extraction equipment and mineral rights that they want to pay off. If it becomes relatively cheap to get solar power online, it will be easier to add it to their inventory while maintaining those other assets.
There is very high employment in certain hot IT fields. Actually in IT in general, but definitely in certain hot fields.
Part of it is, I think, that companies ping pong around to the "newest stuff" and so people who are trained on other things tend to become less employable.
I should point out that I personally am hiring for things like "DevOps", which basically means build and deployment automation, and that that field is so hot right now because everyone has a job who wants one who is at least competent.
I do get candidates that I reject for positions, but that is purely based on their lack of skills or experience with the required tools or concepts. They really don't count. I would like to throw money at someone who can do what I need, which really isn't all that specialized, and I can't find them.
Perhaps it would be easier if everyone just needed people who do Java or C++ or something. Then you could have a big pool of candidates, and people wouldn't become unemployed when someone invents the next big fad. Unfortunately, the business these days revolves around convincing investors that they have the newest hotness, and THAT tend to limit your options for who you can find as a candidate.
This does sound like a policy fail, or an IT department that doesn't know how to work with this OS.
Of course, if this change was politically motivated and directed from above, that could certainly catch an IT department flat footed. Our IT department gets directives all the time to switch to this or that IM or conferencing app because we're suddenly doing business with someone who competes with MS, and they don't want to see Skype on our machines when their stuff could be there. Not much they can do about the boxes running Windows, however. That would be a bridge too far.
If it was the IT department itself in favor of such a change, and yet there are basic functionality failures, then I do have to wonder if they are actually competent or if they fully understood what they were getting into.
I think you're right for the most part about airlines, but there are definite cost savings if an airline can plan flights efficiently ahead of time. It is not ridiculous to have an extra fee for last minute bookings, or perhaps a better way of putting it is that it is not ridiculous to have a discount for early registration.
What is ridiculous is what they actually charge you while using that excuse.
I've seen two sorts of H1-Bs. When I worked in big companies, they tended to be much less skilled and much more like the "el cheapo" sorts of workers that many people fear are replacing "good American workers".
On the other hand, the remaining "good American workers" in those jobs were often captive to the massive specialization and gross bureaucratization of big companies as well.
Other places I have seen the H1-B postings, and I always read the H1-B postings when I see them, those postings are looking for people who are going to be paid $90K, 100K, 120K. These are very decent salaries for developers. Not the best, but pretty in line with average mid-career sorts. So, unless there is some huge bias in *favor* of bringing in Indians just because they are Indians (and perhaps there is in some places), the H1-Bs aren't replacing American jobs with lower paid offshore. They're making as much as I would expect to make in a similar situation as an American citizen.
So, in the end, I am fairly certain that the big corporations are probably abusing the H1-B system in some way, but as a hiring manager in an area with lots of developers/technical people I can tell you that I struggle to find qualified people and I am quite willing to pay them a rate commensurate with what they might expect to make with their skills and experience. We simply don't get large numbers of candidates.
I've never personally hired an H1-B. Although some companies I have worked for do hire them, it is almost always considered to be something you do when you are extremely desperate. For that reason, despite my almost certain belief that a Microsoft abuses the system, I don't think that they're completely full of shit.
Of course, I would prefer a system where we could get these people naturalized and have them move here instead of sending all their money home and then leaving eventually with their skills in tow.
I am entirely in favor of a basic income that you get even if you work at other jobs. I think that the automation and structural unemployment we are seeing is the first stages of automation being able to relieve humans of drudgery.
Unless the profits are distributed more evenly, then you just have more starving people and more money to the already rich. I don't even think the rich themselves care about that except for the fact that they are driven to drive up their "high score". To that end, raising that money should be done by putting in specific inputs at points in the economy where it is easiest to realize income from profits that are clearly due to automation.
If we do this right, we can have a solid economy where people still can and do want to work, but we reduce the possibility of people falling through the cracks.
Note, this is not "taxing the rich". While the rich do realize benefits from automation, there are many, many places where the money saved by automation is diverted. Anyone who believes you can simply upend rich people and shake the money out of their pockets to support this has no understanding of how you would really support such an income long term.
Some people in certain industries would likely lose some or all of their business/jobs. Just like the tax preparers might be out of a job if you made all taxation one flat tax that you got a bill for every month, there are businesses and other people that siphon off the largess afforded by higher production who do not show up in some Forbes of Fortune list of rich people.
This system should not borrow to fund a basic income system unless that borrowing is either for cash flow, or is done in a manner that does not encourage spending more than percentage of GDP that is produced by automation as determined in some scientific manner. The only reasonable theory backing basic income is that automation and efficiency removes drudgery which creates a surplus that can be used to support people who would otherwise work at drudgery. Borrowing to achieve some number and creating huge amounts of debt is the denial and possibly the falsification of that theory and is effectively taking money from people in the future for the comfort of people now.
Aside from how this is funded, my only other problem with any of this is that it would likely be administered by *the* government. I'll grant you, it's the obvious solution, but it is very dangerous in the sense that you become even more dependent on the organization that you should be voting every few years to keep in check.
I think basic income and welfare should be administered by entities that are solely and totally devoted to only maintaining those services with no extra power and no extra authority except what they need to maintain the specific system. They have no army, they have no police. They can tax or raise money, but they use other groups to enforce it. The managers of that system are elected specifically for maintaining that system and while politics are probably unavoidable, it might give us the ability to dispense with clueless generalists and lawyers (ie. legislatures) from trying operate a system they don't understand.
In other words, I should have an option of experts on the economy and administration to pick from. Not careerist legislators. I want people who I can trust to give it to us straight and not allow us to pressure them into providing us bread and circuses that our economy cannot afford. I want to elect people who are good at their job, not just good at telling me what I want to hear. I should be able to have the choice to elect a person who I completely disagree with on foreign policy, but they are right-on with managing a basic income, and not feel nervous that they're going to nuke Iran or something.
While it should be a benefit of citizenship, it needs to be understood not as a "human right" but as the expression of human progress in production and economic growth. No one has a right to live. No one has a right to eat,
Well, put that way, I can see why they'd be interested in it.
For all of that, I don't see much in the way of hipsters when I play. It's mostly people who grew up in the 80's and 90's who used to play games like this when we were younger.
Now that they have kids, they can't always commit to RPG campaigns or things like that. They want to have a reason to be social and have people over that is a lot more fun than a cocktail party or whatever else adults might do to be social when they invite people over.:)
I don't have the problem of children, but since most of my friends now have them, it's something to do when visiting and socializing and it's a lot more likely that the women will play too, if you pick the right game.
Journals have editorial and advisory boards. These are staffed by scientists. If they aren't, then they aren't actual scientific journals and scientists would be morons for accepting any work published by them.
If I opened a journal called Big Joe's Journal of Quantum Chromodynamics and started publishing papers to it from my friends, no one would give a shit because I am not a physicist or even a scientist, and neither are most of my friends.
If these publishers wanted to open a journal without scientists involved, they'd be about as authoritative as my journal, except mine would have better illustrations because I'd buy the big box of Crayola crayons.
Point being, the scientists themselves need to police their field. If you dump it on the publishers, you're ducking responsibility. It's like suggesting a new weapon that specifically targets children, puppies and unicorns, writing the documentation for it, taking money for it from the government, accepting an award for it and then taking zero responsibility when the government uses it as designed. The primary responsibility for these journals is the moral, ethical, and professional duty of scientists and only scientists. If the publishers want to increase readership or something, then they can put tits on every other page or something, but if they are impacting the actual scientific content of a journal, that is the fault of the scientists involved, period.
Sure, all scientists are not on these review boards, but scientists live and die by their professional reputations. If you don't accept them, they lose their career. You are effectively the electorate and the College of Cardinals for these guys. If you let bad scientists keep up this sort of behavior to cater to publishers or their own egos, no one can really change for the better that other than scientists. If you rely on the law or outsiders to do it, you will rue the day, because it will be done based on a broken trust and lost faith in science.
The first step is simply standing up and stop deflecting all blame to publishers for a problem with the practice of science itself. Despite the undoubtedly sleazy nature of those publishers, it fundamentally dishonest to make that deflection.
You don't need to publish to work as a scientist, but it is something that is important to do in order to get tenure in many schools and as you said, is the way to be a leading scientist. And if you're working towards that sort of leading role, you're the type of person who would be publishing to begin with.
As you said, you didn't have to publish, and many don't, but the ones who do publish are often the ones under the most pressure to do so, for whatever reason. This means that the people who have an important part to play in the scientific world are also the most likely to have a reason to misrepresent their results or strive to be underhanded to avoid actual peer review.
What is the upside for a working scientist to misrepresent their results? A better review? Even then, you probably get reviewed more for your investigative technique or your experimental or apparatus design. Which means that you'd get just as good a review for being good at knocking down novel hypotheses as you would for sustaining them. In other words, you'd get a good review for being a good scientist.
A leading scientist is under a lot more pressure to offer something that they can publish which gets themselves or their labs more grant money so that research can continue. Like you, they are valued if they are good at science and falsifying hypotheses, but grants are usually offered for new, interesting science. Knocking over your own bad hypotheses is necessary, but you have to have something to offer in the meantime.
Some researchers end up with nothing they can offer, and they realize that, but they can't pay the bills with all negative results. So they peer review their own work to keep the grants coming. This is no doubt done in the hope that their faith in their hypothesis is rewarded and that they will be able to produce a return on investment, but there are certainly other reasons for that.
Publish or perish is real, it's just not real for everyone who calls themselves a scientist. However, it is a real problem for the scientific community, because grant money and prestige is what keeps academic scientists working. No doubt you would be fine, albeit at a different school or lab, but you and your ilk are not the problem, your bosses and senior researchers are the ones at risk.
I don't want to defend academic publishers here. I have heard many uncomplimentary things about them. The thing is, the middlemen aren't the ones falsifying the peer review recommendations, the scientists are. And there's really only one reason for that: they don't want to go through the peer review process. That's a *science* problem and it must be solved by *scientists*.
If the peer review process for journals does not work, then the scientists on the editorial boards need to stand up and work out a better method. An academic journal isn't worth wiping your ass with if the scientists involved with it refuse to endorse it. And that is what they need to do. Policy makers and laypeople tend to trust scientists in general in a manner that some trust their priests. In fact, these days, a lot more than priests.
However, that is all based on faith and trust, as they are not doing the experiments themselves. Scientists need to work at maintaining the trust they have in their field as a whole or it provides the ammunition to either distrust science or to encourage misrepresentation of results for certain unscientific aims.
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There is always the consideration that lowering the bar tends to increase the caseload and thus, hinder the functioning of the courts, which can cause its own problems.
There may well be a case for changing how standing is determined for certain specific cases like this, but this needs to be work done with a scalpel or you could hopelessly bog down the Federal court system.
No, that isn't justice, it is a bias against the possibility of injustice being worked on the innocent when due process and proper procedure is not employed or there is insufficient evidence.
Justice for the guilty still remains due, we simply hold that it is better for a guilty man to walk free than an innocent man go to jail. Justice has been denied, but we accept the need for that against the possibility of ensuring perfect retaliation for all injust acts, which would allow a much lower standard of evidence and procedure but innocent people would also be punished.
There has always been the assumption by most that even the guilty who get away from the courts unscathed will face justice eventually in some manner. For some, those unrepentant guilty will end up in Hell. For those of a more secular mindset, those who carry out anti-social acts are more likely to end up in a bad way due to their friction with society and their interaction with dangerous people. Justice is frequently served in some manner, although satisfaction of victims can be very hard to ensure in any case.
You are right about the DC Court of Appeals, but the ruling in question is a ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which is a US Federal Circuit Court of Appeal.
So yes, this is a Circuit court opinion which will be resolved by the Supreme Court on appeal. And they are more likely (although not certain) to hear the appeal if there is a Circuit split involved.
Sweeping may not be the word for it, but it is a very influential decision.
The President can fire any cabinet member at will even those requiring Senate approval. The Senate only comes into play when you try and hire a new cabinet member.
There was a law about firing without Senate approval called the Tenure of Office act, but that was repealed in 1887.
So yes, if he decided to fire an executive branch officer who disobeyed his directives, he totally could.
To be fair, I should have put quotes around "conservative" like I did with "progressive".
As other people have pointed out, I am not describing the parties the way they'd like to be portrayed, or you or I think they should be acting, I'm describing them the way they *are*.
The blame goes to both liberals and conservatives who keep adding size and red tape to the government.
Sure, conservatives want more cops and cop gear. The liberals get upset with cops and their solution is regulating the cops into the ground.
The liberals or "progressives" want to create a whole new social experiment with health care or their plan for ending racism or something. They increase the government to do it. The conservatives oppose this. Their solution? More laws to complicate the implementation of the program, or they just hold up the rest of the government to get their way. In the end, the program still gets implemented, but in some mutant form.
Neither strategy streamlines the government because both sides are statists before they are liberals or conservatives. They believe the government is the solution to the problem, they just disagree on what the problem is.
Did it have a 19th floor?
I don't know what a photon or gravity are, but I didn't say I did. I am saying that both investigations are still the subject of science, which they certainly are.
One question that is almost certainly philosophical is the quest to be able to describe a deity. That's almost certainly philosophical because the subject itself, by definition, has the power to avoid measurement if he wishes. While such a being could decide to demonstrate miracles in an rigorously controlled experiment to prove his capabilities, so far, no deity has stepped forward to do so.
You are confusing answering difficult questions with "philosophy". It may be that the answers will only ever be philosophical due to our inability to measure anything related to gravity or photons, but we're certainly not that far enough along yet to even suggest that we can know that. There are plenty of things that are waiting to be measured.
I can certainly be wrong, but I'm not the one insisting that it is a subject for philosophy only.
As I said, if we determine, after investigation, that we cannot measure gravity, then it is a matter of philosophy. We're not even close to that point yet.
I do have to admit, I do wonder about some of these projects.
Still, I think their actual goal is to cater to people who might have more access to a 3-D printer than a doctor, so presumably the value is in the instructions on how to conduct and properly evaluate tests, not the actual speculums.
Since this is LGBTQ-related, I am guessing that they have trouble finding doctors to serve them more often, rather than poverty itself being the major issue. The thing about Mumbai was to illustrate the value of simplified testing to a certain underserved grouping. As usual, the summary was somewhat deceptive.
An actual fusion plant (not holding my breath here) would be able to generate base load much more efficiently than either wind or solar and in any location you can think of. They could also be built anywhere you want to put them, reducing the issues with transmission.
There's definitely a place for it, and that place is to definitively replace fossil fuel and nuclear plants.
As a way to describe the problem of trying to attain complete information in any scenario, it is a very appropriate quote.
As an excuse for failing to do the work to discover the unknown unknowns in Iraq, it didn't cut it.
Not necessarily. The scientific method by itself does none of those things by itself. To do those things, you have to apply that method to unanswered questions which you can suggest a hypothesis for.
If you don't have a question to ask, you don't have a hypothesis to falsify. Science isn't equivalent to exploration.
What gravity is is certainly not philosophy. Why would you even think that?
Gravity has a cause and a mechanism for how it does what it does which is currently undiscovered. Science should certainly be able to discover both of those unless such a thing is impossible due to physical limitations on what we can measure. Then, and only then, would speculation on the causes and mechanism of gravity be more philosophy than science.
I think the idea is to actually teach students where we have gaps in our ability to explain things.
There are many things that are taken to be scientific facts which are anything but proven, and you'd know that if you asked certain experts in the fields.
The problem is that many of us assume that we collectively know more than we actually do, and it gives students the incorrect idea that there is nothing more to be learned, or that they will be doing relatively trivial research. In that sense, we need to explain where the frontiers are, and some of them are hiding in places we didn't expect them to be.
It's not really a course on being ignorant, it is a course to help students to learn where to start looking to find unsolved mysteries.
Such a course would be hugely important because it allows us to discover more questions to answer as well as giving some motivation to those who might otherwise be bored or disheartened by the lack of a frontier.
Don't be ridiculous. Even if they were an actual crime family, most real crime families only oppose something until they can control and profit from it. If Texas goes solar and they control Texas, then they can very well benefit from solar.
Oil companies have been re-branding themselves as "energy companies" for years now. Don't think for a moment that they don't want solar and that is motivating their actions. What they don't want is to be left behind because of their legacy investments in oil/gas/coal extraction. They have significant investments in fossil fuel extraction, but don't think for a moment that they won't simply buy up the solar capacity when it comes time to do so. They may even support it, at some point.
If anything energy companies are being held back by the fact that there is a significant demand for gasoline and other oil products that will not be going anywhere even if we power the grid 100% with solar. They have significant investments in oil extraction equipment and mineral rights that they want to pay off. If it becomes relatively cheap to get solar power online, it will be easier to add it to their inventory while maintaining those other assets.
There is very high employment in certain hot IT fields. Actually in IT in general, but definitely in certain hot fields.
Part of it is, I think, that companies ping pong around to the "newest stuff" and so people who are trained on other things tend to become less employable.
I should point out that I personally am hiring for things like "DevOps", which basically means build and deployment automation, and that that field is so hot right now because everyone has a job who wants one who is at least competent.
I do get candidates that I reject for positions, but that is purely based on their lack of skills or experience with the required tools or concepts. They really don't count. I would like to throw money at someone who can do what I need, which really isn't all that specialized, and I can't find them.
Perhaps it would be easier if everyone just needed people who do Java or C++ or something. Then you could have a big pool of candidates, and people wouldn't become unemployed when someone invents the next big fad. Unfortunately, the business these days revolves around convincing investors that they have the newest hotness, and THAT tend to limit your options for who you can find as a candidate.
This does sound like a policy fail, or an IT department that doesn't know how to work with this OS.
Of course, if this change was politically motivated and directed from above, that could certainly catch an IT department flat footed. Our IT department gets directives all the time to switch to this or that IM or conferencing app because we're suddenly doing business with someone who competes with MS, and they don't want to see Skype on our machines when their stuff could be there. Not much they can do about the boxes running Windows, however. That would be a bridge too far.
If it was the IT department itself in favor of such a change, and yet there are basic functionality failures, then I do have to wonder if they are actually competent or if they fully understood what they were getting into.
Sounds to me like a guide to uploading customer consciousnesses to virtual realities.
I think you're right for the most part about airlines, but there are definite cost savings if an airline can plan flights efficiently ahead of time. It is not ridiculous to have an extra fee for last minute bookings, or perhaps a better way of putting it is that it is not ridiculous to have a discount for early registration.
What is ridiculous is what they actually charge you while using that excuse.
I've seen two sorts of H1-Bs. When I worked in big companies, they tended to be much less skilled and much more like the "el cheapo" sorts of workers that many people fear are replacing "good American workers".
On the other hand, the remaining "good American workers" in those jobs were often captive to the massive specialization and gross bureaucratization of big companies as well.
Other places I have seen the H1-B postings, and I always read the H1-B postings when I see them, those postings are looking for people who are going to be paid $90K, 100K, 120K. These are very decent salaries for developers. Not the best, but pretty in line with average mid-career sorts. So, unless there is some huge bias in *favor* of bringing in Indians just because they are Indians (and perhaps there is in some places), the H1-Bs aren't replacing American jobs with lower paid offshore. They're making as much as I would expect to make in a similar situation as an American citizen.
So, in the end, I am fairly certain that the big corporations are probably abusing the H1-B system in some way, but as a hiring manager in an area with lots of developers/technical people I can tell you that I struggle to find qualified people and I am quite willing to pay them a rate commensurate with what they might expect to make with their skills and experience. We simply don't get large numbers of candidates.
I've never personally hired an H1-B. Although some companies I have worked for do hire them, it is almost always considered to be something you do when you are extremely desperate. For that reason, despite my almost certain belief that a Microsoft abuses the system, I don't think that they're completely full of shit.
Of course, I would prefer a system where we could get these people naturalized and have them move here instead of sending all their money home and then leaving eventually with their skills in tow.
I am entirely in favor of a basic income that you get even if you work at other jobs. I think that the automation and structural unemployment we are seeing is the first stages of automation being able to relieve humans of drudgery.
Unless the profits are distributed more evenly, then you just have more starving people and more money to the already rich. I don't even think the rich themselves care about that except for the fact that they are driven to drive up their "high score". To that end, raising that money should be done by putting in specific inputs at points in the economy where it is easiest to realize income from profits that are clearly due to automation.
If we do this right, we can have a solid economy where people still can and do want to work, but we reduce the possibility of people falling through the cracks.
Note, this is not "taxing the rich". While the rich do realize benefits from automation, there are many, many places where the money saved by automation is diverted. Anyone who believes you can simply upend rich people and shake the money out of their pockets to support this has no understanding of how you would really support such an income long term.
Some people in certain industries would likely lose some or all of their business/jobs. Just like the tax preparers might be out of a job if you made all taxation one flat tax that you got a bill for every month, there are businesses and other people that siphon off the largess afforded by higher production who do not show up in some Forbes of Fortune list of rich people.
This system should not borrow to fund a basic income system unless that borrowing is either for cash flow, or is done in a manner that does not encourage spending more than percentage of GDP that is produced by automation as determined in some scientific manner. The only reasonable theory backing basic income is that automation and efficiency removes drudgery which creates a surplus that can be used to support people who would otherwise work at drudgery. Borrowing to achieve some number and creating huge amounts of debt is the denial and possibly the falsification of that theory and is effectively taking money from people in the future for the comfort of people now.
Aside from how this is funded, my only other problem with any of this is that it would likely be administered by *the* government. I'll grant you, it's the obvious solution, but it is very dangerous in the sense that you become even more dependent on the organization that you should be voting every few years to keep in check.
I think basic income and welfare should be administered by entities that are solely and totally devoted to only maintaining those services with no extra power and no extra authority except what they need to maintain the specific system. They have no army, they have no police. They can tax or raise money, but they use other groups to enforce it. The managers of that system are elected specifically for maintaining that system and while politics are probably unavoidable, it might give us the ability to dispense with clueless generalists and lawyers (ie. legislatures) from trying operate a system they don't understand.
In other words, I should have an option of experts on the economy and administration to pick from. Not careerist legislators. I want people who I can trust to give it to us straight and not allow us to pressure them into providing us bread and circuses that our economy cannot afford. I want to elect people who are good at their job, not just good at telling me what I want to hear. I should be able to have the choice to elect a person who I completely disagree with on foreign policy, but they are right-on with managing a basic income, and not feel nervous that they're going to nuke Iran or something.
While it should be a benefit of citizenship, it needs to be understood not as a "human right" but as the expression of human progress in production and economic growth. No one has a right to live. No one has a right to eat,
Well, put that way, I can see why they'd be interested in it.
For all of that, I don't see much in the way of hipsters when I play. It's mostly people who grew up in the 80's and 90's who used to play games like this when we were younger.
Now that they have kids, they can't always commit to RPG campaigns or things like that. They want to have a reason to be social and have people over that is a lot more fun than a cocktail party or whatever else adults might do to be social when they invite people over. :)
I don't have the problem of children, but since most of my friends now have them, it's something to do when visiting and socializing and it's a lot more likely that the women will play too, if you pick the right game.
Journals have editorial and advisory boards. These are staffed by scientists. If they aren't, then they aren't actual scientific journals and scientists would be morons for accepting any work published by them.
If I opened a journal called Big Joe's Journal of Quantum Chromodynamics and started publishing papers to it from my friends, no one would give a shit because I am not a physicist or even a scientist, and neither are most of my friends.
If these publishers wanted to open a journal without scientists involved, they'd be about as authoritative as my journal, except mine would have better illustrations because I'd buy the big box of Crayola crayons.
Point being, the scientists themselves need to police their field. If you dump it on the publishers, you're ducking responsibility. It's like suggesting a new weapon that specifically targets children, puppies and unicorns, writing the documentation for it, taking money for it from the government, accepting an award for it and then taking zero responsibility when the government uses it as designed. The primary responsibility for these journals is the moral, ethical, and professional duty of scientists and only scientists. If the publishers want to increase readership or something, then they can put tits on every other page or something, but if they are impacting the actual scientific content of a journal, that is the fault of the scientists involved, period.
Sure, all scientists are not on these review boards, but scientists live and die by their professional reputations. If you don't accept them, they lose their career. You are effectively the electorate and the College of Cardinals for these guys. If you let bad scientists keep up this sort of behavior to cater to publishers or their own egos, no one can really change for the better that other than scientists. If you rely on the law or outsiders to do it, you will rue the day, because it will be done based on a broken trust and lost faith in science.
The first step is simply standing up and stop deflecting all blame to publishers for a problem with the practice of science itself. Despite the undoubtedly sleazy nature of those publishers, it fundamentally dishonest to make that deflection.
You don't need to publish to work as a scientist, but it is something that is important to do in order to get tenure in many schools and as you said, is the way to be a leading scientist. And if you're working towards that sort of leading role, you're the type of person who would be publishing to begin with.
As you said, you didn't have to publish, and many don't, but the ones who do publish are often the ones under the most pressure to do so, for whatever reason. This means that the people who have an important part to play in the scientific world are also the most likely to have a reason to misrepresent their results or strive to be underhanded to avoid actual peer review.
What is the upside for a working scientist to misrepresent their results? A better review? Even then, you probably get reviewed more for your investigative technique or your experimental or apparatus design. Which means that you'd get just as good a review for being good at knocking down novel hypotheses as you would for sustaining them. In other words, you'd get a good review for being a good scientist.
A leading scientist is under a lot more pressure to offer something that they can publish which gets themselves or their labs more grant money so that research can continue. Like you, they are valued if they are good at science and falsifying hypotheses, but grants are usually offered for new, interesting science. Knocking over your own bad hypotheses is necessary, but you have to have something to offer in the meantime.
Some researchers end up with nothing they can offer, and they realize that, but they can't pay the bills with all negative results. So they peer review their own work to keep the grants coming. This is no doubt done in the hope that their faith in their hypothesis is rewarded and that they will be able to produce a return on investment, but there are certainly other reasons for that.
Publish or perish is real, it's just not real for everyone who calls themselves a scientist. However, it is a real problem for the scientific community, because grant money and prestige is what keeps academic scientists working. No doubt you would be fine, albeit at a different school or lab, but you and your ilk are not the problem, your bosses and senior researchers are the ones at risk.
I don't want to defend academic publishers here. I have heard many uncomplimentary things about them. The thing is, the middlemen aren't the ones falsifying the peer review recommendations, the scientists are. And there's really only one reason for that: they don't want to go through the peer review process. That's a *science* problem and it must be solved by *scientists*.
If the peer review process for journals does not work, then the scientists on the editorial boards need to stand up and work out a better method. An academic journal isn't worth wiping your ass with if the scientists involved with it refuse to endorse it. And that is what they need to do. Policy makers and laypeople tend to trust scientists in general in a manner that some trust their priests. In fact, these days, a lot more than priests.
However, that is all based on faith and trust, as they are not doing the experiments themselves. Scientists need to work at maintaining the trust they have in their field as a whole or it provides the ammunition to either distrust science or to encourage misrepresentation of results for certain unscientific aims.