Depends if your career depends on some facts not being true. Scientists can seem like a threat to you specifically if for example you need Climate Change to not be real. The last thing you would want is someone bringing evidence and analysis to that reality.
It is good for EU but I belive he was pointing to these hurr durr emigrants bad people. Usually the same people which conveniently always forget that they probalby come as much poorer people than these ones.
I came here to see if the comments could explain to my why this obviously bad thing is actually good. Its somewhat comforting to see others worried about the implication. The fact is that governments (aka public funding) is really what drives the biggest most impactful sorts of scientific breakthroughs. Think: NASA spinoffs, the internet, rocketry, MRNA, etc.
I know that the US has been failing to fund important things like Fusion for more than 40 years now but its sad and scary to see it halting.
> Is it not a good thing that these folks could do something more productive in the private sector?
That's assuming that they could do something more productive in the private sector. I don't think that's true in a whole lot of cases. The private sector is about maximizing profit, but there's a whole universe of productive and necessary things that don't lead directly to profit. The private sector is terrible at doing those things.
And, depending on what exactly we're talking about, it's very often the case that the private sector is much less efficient in terms of bang for the buck.
> Wouldn't it be better if companies like these had a larger pool of PhDs to pull from?
The pool they're pulling from isn't getting larger. It's getting smaller.
I think your "every fusion startup that raised $100m" link answers that question. Fusion startups haven't been bottlenecked by being unable to afford to poach talent previously administering grant programs or working in government-funded plasma physics labs. Shutting the labs and programs down on the other hand does slow down the fundamental research that leads to those startups
>Private sector does some things better, see Rocket Lab, Blue Origin, SpaceX, et al.
All of those companies exist on the backbone of work that was done by government funded labs. You are just seeing the investments pay off.
PHds aren't engineers. The whole point of a PHd is basically spending a whole bunch of time working on something, with a very slight chance that it may or may not work - this is not something that is compatible with a private sector in any means. The point is that as a collective, you hope that someone has a brain blast moment and discover something that engineers can then take and make viable.
I don't think this is necessarily a good thing. I'm in favor of the private sector, but these public sector research and scientific institutions also do very important work.
Some of the most brightest and accomplished scientists out of academia elect to forgo a higher paying private sector job in order to go into the civil service and work on even higher impact, lower paying jobs that don't necessarily chase an obvious profit motive. Ask yourself why.
Your phrasing "something more productive in the private sector" is taken from the DOGE emails to federal employees. Note that in this sense "productive" means "makes money for corporations". If your utility function is different, these jobs are no longer more productive.
For a very concrete illustration, I know a Veterans Administration physician who got the DOGE emails. He's been underpaid by $50k-100k per year compared to private market rates, for the last twenty years. He is happy to take that discount because the mission of caring for veterans is something he cares about, and because he feels he can practice better medicine if his goal is patient outcomes rather than billable procedures. He also values the education and research priorities of the VA.
It is absolutely true that he would make a lot more money for a private provider maximizing procedures and billing.
But is that what we should be optimizing for as a society? Is that what you personally aim for from your doctors?
Really think about this claim: "private sector does some things better." What evidence is there of this really that isn't anecdotal? There are so many things tossed around like this which sound plausible but for which I can't think of a definitive, conclusive, account.
For example: the public sector literally send humans to the moon with technology vastly inferior to that which we currently have at our disposal. Heck, the Soviet Union put a probe on the surface of Venus and sent back images. To me, it is not at all clear that "private sector better" is a foregone conclusion. At best you could make the strong claim that contemporary economic theory predicts that private sector companies do better.
Tell me have you thoroughly researched where all of the NOAA or NIH products go? The private sector has given us AccuWeather for the former and nothing for the latter.
I rely on NOAA forecasts to stay safe a lot and no private company gives me the kind of volume of information about the weather, hydrology, and sea conditions that they do. Call me when the private sector maintains flood gauges on all the rivers where I live or weather stations on peaks or satellites overhead.
I’m just thoroughly sick of hearing people repeat Reagan like he’s some kind of prophet.
That’s productivity fetish. Not everything is about being productive, research is about finding new things. No one knows how to do this reliably at scale, so the best we’ve come up with is having lots of people working on a range of topics, and hoping a few are fruitful. This idea we can just retweet the unsuccessful researches to private sector doesn’t work, because we don’t know how to not do unproductive research.
Measuring fundamental research by industry productivity standards is how we’ve gotten “publish or perish” culture and “salami slice publishing”. We have to allow space for projects to just fail in research and not have that be the end of someone because they weren’t “productive” enough.
Not everyone agress that those things are necessarily good. I think the Apollo program for example was a massive waste of money that didn't improve anything for the average person. It was mostly just a dick-swinging contest with the USSR to see who had the biggest rocket and could get people to the moon first.
> I think the Apollo program for example was a massive waste of money that didn't improve anything for the average person
i mean, sure, that makes sense if you've never gotten on a plane, eaten food, used a space blanket when camping or in an emergency, been in an earthquake prone area or had hearing aids (non-exhaustive list)
> It was mostly just a dick-swinging contest with the USSR to see who had the biggest rocket and could get people to the moon first.
just because this was the primary political goal, and i'm 100% in agreement with you there, it does not mean that there were no other benefits to humanity. sometimes, humanity can accidentally do a good thing for everyone because we're trying to beat the other guy in a race. it does happen, sometimes.
In the current social climate I would absolutely not trust public media to understand general consensus. Ask specific people you trust or seek out their opinions.
In mainstream media, public consensus is bought by the highest bidder, or the whims of the board of the company.
In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.
Unfortunately most people are too lazy/busy to seek out trusted information, and many if not most have no ability to understand if the answer they get should be trusted or not.
> In social media, general consensus is owned by those that control the best and most bots to direct the conversation.
Isn't it owned by the owner of the social media platform? Do you think Zuckerberg, Musk, etc are neutral? There is an enormous amount of evidence otherwise.
If some bots proliferate, it's because the owners allow those bots to do so.
Listen, if they actually had the ability to detect bots perfectly just from owning a big tech company, then we wouldn't need spam filters. Perfect bot detection would be a very valuable product. It is one thing to hold responsibility to those with power, it is another to ask the literally impossible of them.
Detection doesn't have to be anywhere near perfect to be effective, though I expect that they can do it pretty well at this point. Remember they have visibility into far more than users do.
> we wouldn't need spam filters
? Spam filters rely on spam detection, and do a sufficient job.
There's a good chance they'd have been put to use strengthening the advertisement-dopamine-corporate control cycle that humanity is currently suffering under.
I see the words "feature parity". I hope those words are taken seriously. I feel like most Wayland advocates would do well to take those words seriously.
Absolutely seriously. To me, a big part of what makes Xfce is xfwm4's behavior. Even though most of the other Xfce components will run decently well on wlroots-based compositors, I don't really have an interest in using them, as that's not "Xfce" to me.
But it's not going to be perfect, though, as some things that we take for granted on x11 still just do not have Wayland protocols to enable them. This will take a long time. Alex's blog post says a developer preview around the middle of this year, and I expect I can deliver on that, and maybe (maybe!) even a stable release by next year (maybe!), but full feature parity will take years.
I'm pretty anti-AI but this isn't really anything to do with AI. The same problem would arise with any online service that you use to hold important data. And it's pretty evil for any such service to have a trap "delete all my stuff with no warning" button.
One big reason I can think of that would make one want a permanent data purge feature, is that the data is not on their premises but on the service provider's. I think GDPR might even require such a feature under a similar rationale.
So maybe a better formulation would be to force the user to transfer out a copy of their data before allowing deletion? That way, the service provider could well and truly wash their hands of this issue.
Forcing an export is an interesting idea. But, like, from the article it sounds like almost anything would be a better flow. It didn't even warn that any data would be deleted at all.
One further refinement I can think of is bundling in a deletion code with the export archive, e.g. a UUID. Then they could request the user to put in that code into a confirmation box, thereby "guaranteeing" the user did indeed download the whole thing and that the service provider is free to nuke it.
Wouldn't really be a guarantee in technical actuality, but one really needs to go out of their way to violate it. I guess this does make me a baddie insofar that this is probably how "theaters" are born, rituals that do not / cannot actually carry the certainty they bolster in their effect, just an empirical one if that.
My point is that if improved airport security just shifts terrorist attacks to other places, the overall safety benefit is not as great as it may at first seem.
If those attack vectors are intrinsically less effective at causing mass destruction then that’s an improvement.
A plane hijacking can evidently cause enormous destruction with minimal equipment and personnel. Even just a bomb on a plane can easily kill 200-500 people depending on the plane’s capacity.
Ground-based attacks since 9/11 have been evidently less effective because a bunch of guys with guns attacking a train station or a rock concert can’t do as much damage as quickly as a hijacker essentially flying a cruise missile into a major office building.
That's nonsense - if it was true, all anti-terrorism measures would be self-defeating, but they're not. Decades of aircraft-based terrorist attacks have been completely halted by airport security, and there's no been no correlated increase in other mass casualty events.
I seriously doubt that most people are happy with the tradeoffs of safety vs. convenience provided by the TSA. The general idea of x-ray, metal detectors, sure, that's all good. But the stuff with taking off your shoes, small containers of liquid, etc., no. I think if we reverted to a simpler system with fewer oddly specific requirements layered on top, most people would not feel significantly less safe, but would feel less inconvenienced.
The thing about shoes is just dumb anyway - I don't know if there was some period of time where it was required elsewhere around the world but I never experienced it. Literally the only times I've ever had to take off my shoes were during the two times I've visited the US (vs. a over a dozen trips to European and Asian countries).
Liquid restrictions were also lifted in my country four or so years ago for domestic travel, so it's still annoying when getting ready for an international trip and I remember I still have to do that...
It was a reaction to a very specific incident that happened just after 9/11 so the policy basically took effect at the same time the TSA started existing.
I flew out of the UK twice in relatively short succession in ~2018 and the first time was out of London City: did not have to take off my shoes. I was pleasantly surprised by this and concluded common sense had prevailed and it was no longer necessary. The second time was Gatwick, and based on my prior experience I did not take off my shoes. I got yelled at because "everybody knows you have to take off your shoes at the airport!". Then got subjected to an extra search of my luggage as punishment. Of course there was a razor in my bag of toiletries (one of those Gilette cartridge ones with a million blades - not an oldschool safety razor) and promptly 'got got' for that as it could have potentially injured the person searching my belongings. 0/10 would not recommend.
Duplicating things is underrated. It's good for there to be multiple operators doing basically the same thing. Innovation can happen at the margins. It will be easier, not harder, for EU companies to innovate in meaningful ways after they've built their own systems and are no longer just following in the wake of big US companies. (Not to mention that half of what passes for innovation these days is actually bad.)
If you’re assessing things entirely on a strategic basis makes total sense. It’s understandable why they are doing it but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s underrated or suggest there are no drawbacks.
Duplicating things without reason is wasteful. With a hobby project sure that’s your own time and is likely more an act of consumption and personal fulfilment. But these are national economic resources being redirected away from other things.
In software in a large codebase where there are coordination costs with reuse due to the organisation structure, there’s a strategic reason not to reuse, but it might highlight a limitation of the organisation structure, but that’s not something someone making the call to reuse code or not can do much about.
Likewise France really can’t do much about the state of the US and dependency is understandably seen as a risk.
I mean there are pros and cons to many things. What I mean by underrated is just that a lot of people say "oh duplication, how wasteful" and don't realize the benefits that may exist in redundancy and diffusion. I think the US would benefit right now if there was more "duplication" in the sense of greater diversity across many industries. More car makers, more film studios, more news organizations, more social media companies, more record labels. Not more stuff --- not more cars, more films, more news, more social media, more records --- but just the same stuff spread over a greater number of entities. The consolidation we've seen over the past several decades is a bad thing.
You know you CAN actually quantify how bad or good these things are in what respect and their second order effects. The trades off are pretty well understood. Increasing returns to scale are a thing, as are natural monopolies where consolidation is more efficient even with the headaches that comes with regulating a monopoly.
Car makers, entertainment companies, news organisations are very different kinds of industries to the ones we’re talking about here. They aren’t natural monopolies and don’t feature increasing to scale (at all output levels). In media, the reasons we’re seeing consolidation is due to entry barriers primarily with how IPs protections work. This is entirely unrelated.
Also you’re talking about this entirely from a consumers point of view. From economy wide point of view, duplication of a product will pull resources away from other industries that might be more profitable for a country. Which is bad for the same reason tariffs are bad. These are real costs that will affect quality of life and crowd out desirable economic activity.
Just circling back to this original article. This is arguably not one of those cases.
But redundancy and duplication purely on principle is dogmatic and shortsighted, and yes wasteful. We don’t have infinite resources in the world.
People often mention email as an example of federated communication, but the way email works in practice doesn't entirely live up to that ideal. Good luck getting your own self-hosted email server to send emails that actually reach anyone using a major email provider; they'll just be blocked as spam.
In practice, email is much less federated than it seems. A significant proportion of people are just using gmail. You probably don't have to include that many providers to cover a majority of people in the US.
I think federation has promise, but federation in itself is not a solution. Technical approaches do not address the more fundamental issue that, regardless of the mechanics of the system, big players will have more influence on its operation and evolution. Thus we will always need sociopolitical mechanisms to restrict big players.
But in practice in doesn't always give you a choice, because the biggest providers will embrace and extend and start providing things other providers don't. Or they'll just make it difficult to export your data, etc.
I agree. I see a lot of comments here and articles out on the web where it seems like people don't realize you can turn notifications off. A large portion of the distraction problem of tech is really a notification problem. Push notifications are the scourge of our era. The only things that I get notifications for on my phone are messaging things that I use for personal messaging (text messages, calls, etc.). If I want to check my email I open up an email program and check it. It's mindblowing to me when I look at someone else's phone and see the constant stream of notifications that are nothing more than ads from various apps.
Not to mention the problem of bad reviews for one product not getting transferred to a "new" product that is just the same product again with a different listing.
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