So, a significant chunk of the founders were very skeptical of democracy and saw the risks of demagoguery. Their answer unfortunately tended to be to let the rich run things, because rich people (like themselves) would be more likely to be public minded and not selfish. That’s also, one might say, why the president has as much power as is allocated to that office independent of the legislature - initially, some wanted a king - and why the senate has more power than the house, and senators were not originally determined by popular election. The 17th amendment was passed in 1913.
They made a few other mistakes, too. Although some people (notably including Washington) saw the threat of political parties (which might in fact be an inevitable aspect of democracy), they also thought that the self interest of office holders would be to their office - president vs house vs senate vs judiciary, federal vs state governments - and did not foresee that people would instead find their self interest in their party, which would coordinate across all of those boundaries.
They also carried the enlightenment ideal of people being rational self interested actors who could deliberate and put aside self interest for the good of the country. Adam Smith himself said as much.
It comes down to selfishness versus tribalism versus what David Singer calls the expanding circle of inclusion (family, tribe, city, nation, humanity, ecosystem).
Not from my office window per se, but on my way into work I saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. That was weird and messed me up for a bit.
The weirdest one was probably back in March/April of 2020 when we were in a total covid lockdown, and an ice cream truck - completely alone on the street and the only vehicle seen for days - slowly drove by while playing Christmas music. That was some Twilight Zone shit.
I first started using Linux in 1995 (I think it was kernel 1.2 or something), and this was being argued over (or at least discussed) even back then. The conclusion was that Leenus doesn’t care how you pronounce Leenux.
It’s sooooo close, but that tiny bit of asymmetry just throws it off, especially given the title.
Can I suggest reducing the depth of field effect by blurring the background building just enough to make the asymmetry less obvious? The overall effect might be less striking but other than reshooting the pic I can’t think of another fix.
I am pretty sure this is pure virtue signaling that will be overturned. The article mentions that “Israel boycott” laws have been upheld, but I’m unsure of either the effectiveness of those laws (ie what has to be demonstrated if the entity doesn’t say they’re not entering a contract for political reasons but rather has another justification) or the applicability (since my guess is that the BDS stuff falls under some stretch of the government being the only entity allowed to effect foreign policy decisions, but I’m not sure of the actual legal basis and I’m too tired to research it at the moment).
IIRC, Texas was one of the states that was looking to pass laws making it illegal to facilitate a person getting an out of state abortion based on passing laws about using public roads to leave the state. I am skeptical as to the constitutionality of those laws, but they are either in process or have been passed in several red states.
I think that the constitutional protection of interstate commerce might apply, but the laws are yet to be tested. You can fly to Las Vegas to gamble, even if gambling is illegal in Texas, for example. The more concerning potential application is whether they can consider an out of state abortion itself a crime, in the same way that if you fly to California and get stoned, you can (maybe) get picked up in Texas and get charged with testing positive for cannabis. I don’t know that they do that, but if it’s against the law to have a controlled substance in your system, I could see the possibility. I’m also concerned, if the interstate thing gets fucked over, that medical providers could potentially have a warrant put out for them in another state and either have a judgement entered against them or be forced to appear. Again, I’m not sure whether even this ACOTUS would go that far - there’s a very good reason the feds keep the states out of that kind of thing - but I’ve also stopped trying to predict what constitutes “too far” because they’ve so far violated every line in the sand I’ve managed to draw.
Design a vehicle with as low a cost as possible. Maybe create a design challenge with a cash prize
Have the international community (mostly the US but it’d be reasonable for other countries to be pressured for this) subsidize the cost of the vehicles so they are competitive with ICE vehicles.
Infrastructure for charging and repairs. This is going to be incredibly expensive and we’d again have to look for subsidies to develop a power grid and charging stations, as well as creating local services to repair the vehicles.
The moral motivation for subsidies lies in the fact that the west in general is that the west has profited massively via wealth and resource extraction from Africa.
Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.
The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.
There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.
I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.
The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.
I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.
What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.
I had someone argue that their cherished d100 gave a different probability than 2d10.