pbmonster
2d ago
Are the current national labs "part of the government" in any meaningful way?
pbmonster
2d ago
You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced
Agreed. I proposed a solution for that downthread: move all university STEM research to national labs, and have them train grad students. Undergrads stay with their "teaching professors" at the current universities.
pbmonster
2d ago
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts. STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture.
Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.
I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.
I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.
pbmonster
2d ago
So then the question is if we really want to mess with the system that globally is the best at driving fundamental research in the hard sciences - because of a pretty small number of people spreading garbage on TV or through their private blog. Which, arguably, those people would be doing anyways (there's plenty of idiots with normal jobs successfully spreading garbage through the same channels). So really, we would only be changing their title from "Professor" to "Doctor".
pbmonster
3d ago
"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities?
Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.
As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.
Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.
So, what's the solution? Don't worry to much about it. Hire already successful mentees from the previous generation of strong links, punish outright fraud (Alzheimer research scandal, ect.) and leave them alone. And then don't trust any of them to much - if you're making policy decisions on their advice, you need a large meta study anyway. Usually, a strong link contrarian will appear.
What you shouldn't do is have a new crop of elected representative fight their way deep into the system every 4 years and topple everything. That actually affects outcomes.
pbmonster
3d ago
one of my roommates, who never practiced polyamory per see, but always had a "rotation" of girls going (maybe this is the cool chad version of poly, idk)
There's a joke along the lines of "Ah, so you sleep with a bunch of different girls, who each also might or might not sleep with a bunch of different guys - but you really like them, and one of them might be your housemate? Back in my days, we used to call that 'being single in college'."
Depends on how they do it. I've read so many tariff stories from industry insiders, and they all go "We used to import this for $80, shipping, handling and fees brings it to $100, and to account for our overhead we sell it for $300 plus tax. But now, we import it for $80, tariffs brings that to $110, shipping and handling brings that to $130, and to maintain our margins, we have to sell it for $390 plus tax."
They ignore that because of tariffs, they now make $260 of profit instead of $200, and half-heatedly claim that this is because of "margin" and because of "overhead". This insistence to preserve the gross margin percentage (instead of preserving the dollar amount margin per product) makes absolutely no sense to me, but they literally all do it. Margin is a percentage, end of story.
So, you probably can't learn much from looking at what Amazon claims are tariff costs.
pbmonster
16d ago
- Day 1: Approach day. Drive into the mountains, ascend to camp/the mountain hut by evening.
- Day 2: Summit day. Spend the day hiking and preferably climbing. Chill at camp/hut to soak in the views, or (ideally) move to a new location.
- Day 3: Summit secondary peaks, take a detour back to the car.
pbmonster
16d ago
If I were queen, my hard rule would be no sexuality in school for any kid under 12. At 13 or so, obviously you need to explain sex and how babies are made
Bit late, isn't it? By that time, most of the girls will be menstruating and a few of them might be sexually active already.
And sure, you can argue that the parents should have prepared them for all of that, but realistically, some haven't. I'd prefer it if the schools make sure they have some idea what's going on, at the very least the biological reality of their situation.
pbmonster
24d ago
While we have advanced pretty far on the "reacts to sensory inputs" front lately, the "autonomous reproduction" is still sorely lacking.
pbmonster
26d ago
US phone manufacturing capabilities have little to do with "AI killbots"
How do you imagine the first generations of killbots to look like? I imagine a state of the art mobile processor, a lithium battery, a camera module, lidar, GPS, compass, gyroscope, accelerometer, modem, beam forming GHz antenna package. Motors, props, shaped charge explosive.
Remove the last three and add a screen, what do you have?
pbmonster
29d ago
How is such an obvious target not immediately blown to pieces via airpower?
The Houthis are operating in a much smaller area than the Somali pirates did before them. The oceans are big, the horizon is small. Finding a pirate ship via aircraft hours after a call for help (which is how long it takes until airpower arrives if your navy isn't dominating the seas and your allies are far and few between) is difficult, especially if you try avoiding blowing up random fishing boats.
And both Somalis and Houthis are extremely low tech. Doesn't take much to give a pirate ship thousands of miles of range.
pbmonster
29d ago
For a less insane aproach just have soldiers with RPGs and Snipers with shoot on sight orders stationed on every ship.
I'm not convinced. The escalation is to easy for the pirates. Current Somali militias could do it if they cared. Slightly bigger ship, 10 tons of hand mixed concrete to form a ghetto pillbox, soviet artillery piece. Done.
They can't board as easily anymore, but they can threaten to blow up the cargo ship's bridge.
Escalating for the cargo ships is not as easy. They already have to keep most of their hardware and mercenaries in international waters on their floating armory ships, they really don't want to install naval guns every time the mercenaries board a cargo vessel.
I mean, sure. And the Marines are part of the DoD. Does that facilitate ideological capture, especially one that differs between administrations?
My personal experience in both cases says no, not really. The government can't significantly change the ideological makeup of either the national labs or the Marines, and both are ideologically not significantly different than the median of the population.
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