It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service
Cup sinks in fume hoods used to be more common, but as a lab planner they are pretty rare requests nowadays. If I had to guess, it's probably to do with the move away from central acid-waste neutralization systems towards procedural controls dictating neutralization/dilution prior to disposal.
I'd argue the internet was moving things left, while the bar for entry was at least nominal. When the bar for sharing your ideas was at least as high as "learn to code HTML and find a place to put your site up" the Time Cube cranks were few and far between, and most people participating on the web could be assumed to have some modicum of intelligence. However, the defining factor of the Internet as it stands, dominated by social media platforms, is that it's frictionless by design. And yes, the platforms are pushing right-wing content, but to a certain extent that's accidental, or at least was when engagement algorithms first became a part of the experience. Left wing content, reality-based as it tends to be, is generally full of nuance, equivocation, and explanation that takes time and (critically) doesn't reach down into the basal structures of the brain and squeeze the amygdala quite like a right-wing fearmonger shouting "TRANS PEOPLE ARE SNEAKING INTO YOUR DAUGHTER'S SCHOOL RESTROOM TO ASSAULT HER BE AFRAID!"
Could social media be designed to put the brakes on reactionary content and boost thoughtful, well-researched opinions? Yeah, probably. But that requires expensive and time-consuming human intervention in the form of fact-checking, and doesn't boost engagement like content that just pushes all the fight-or-flight buttons way down in the lizard brain. Making the Internet easy and frictionless only turbocharged Terry Pratchett's idea that "A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on," because technology makes the lie spread faster than ever, but the process of getting to the truth never got easier at quite the same rate.
Yes, and I was one of that generation who believed broad adoption of the Internet would cut out the gatekeepers and lead to a better-informed electorate that would give more radical ideas a shot. And I guess it did, but the problem is that it's primarily allowed the worst of bad actors direct, unfiltered access to a vast swathe of the most credulous, easily-manipulated idiots in the world. Arguably it's massively tilted the field towards authoritarianism because before the Internet, left-wing activists were better-educated, and more capable of organizing and communicating. Now, though, it takes no special knowledge or effort for a right-wing conspiracy theorist or authoritarian demagogue to jump on X or Facebook or whatever other platform you like and immediately blast their message out to vast numbers of their followers -- who are largely passive consumers of this stuff, waiting to given their party line and marching orders. Before the Internet, they had mostly-mainstream ideas because that was what the filter of the mainstream media gave them. Now they're getting sucked into the far right because social media is biased for shareable outrage-bait propaganda and against validated facts and nuanced discussion.
What I will say about them publicly is that if we are afforded another shot at democracy after all this, they and their fellow travelers cannot be permitted to have a voice in the political process. Just about any system of government can work if everybody involved is commited to making it work, but if 1/3+ of voters hold pluralistic, representative democracy in active disdain there is no system that can protect itself against those people engaging with the system in bad faith. This was the fundamental failing of reconstruction, and it's shaping up to be the undoing of freedom in the US now.
I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that just letting the "marketplace of ideas" play out is tantamount to throwing the gates open to any demagogue with a big enough megaphone. Participation in the political process must be restricted to good-faith actors in some fashion, be that at the "supply side" of media and content creation or at the voting booth. Anything else is akin to a basketball team kicking, biting, and throwing punches on the court and the referees shrugging and insisting they have to be allowed to play anyway.
Given how buddy-buddy he is with Erdogan and Modi, I don't think that's strictly true -- but no, with a name like Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow (really!), perhaps there are some prejudices at play...
Last I checked, Turkmenistan's entire economy had been turned towards the project of sucking off their former president (who is the dad of the current president) by building lots of garish statues, museums, hotels with his name and face on them. One would think that sort of thing would be right up Donny's alley.
Pyrite disease! The pyrite oxidizes in humid air, converting to a mineral that takes up much more volume. If the pyrite is incorporated into the fossil matrix, that expansion causes the fossil to crumble.
I won't lie, the fact that Americans got a taste of this and then voted to go back for another bite of the apple (not to mention the global rightward shift that's been happening along with it) has soured me a bit on representative democracy. Democratic modes of government seem to be fundamentally incapable of defending themselves against demagoguery, and too large a percentage of the population prefer to be told what to do and who to hate rather than put in the work of engaging seriously with the civic duties required to make a democracy work. I'm at a loss as to what a viable alternative might look like -- various forms of autocracy are what we're trying to avoid, and I've never seen any anarchist ideas that seem like they could work at scale, but clearly democracy falls apart when too many of the people participating in it refuse to participate in good faith.
Worse than that... The commercial weather services aren't doing much more than repackaging or (questionably) refining NWS forecast data, which is derived from a global weather simulation that runs on a supercomputer cluster four times a day, incorporating data from NWS radars, government weather satellites, ground stations, etc. Musk and company want to blow this up because providing all that sophisticated data free of charge undercuts the ability of commercial services to charge for the same thing, but there's no private infrastructure capable of generating the data underlying the base NWS forecast. Unless they plan to simply privatize all of that (a distinct possibility) destroying the NWS just means that there will be no high quality national forecasting at all, and even if they do privatize the infrastructure the expertise to make it all work won't necessarily follow.
Personally, I'd like to suspend the 8th Amendment for law enforcement and senior executive branch personnel. Fuckers need to feel the Sword of Damocles actively tickling their scalp at all times.
Look, I'm in no position to talk seeing as I once wrote a cron job in PHP, but the profusion of JavaScript in the late aughts and early teens for things that weren't "make my website prettier!" feels very much like a bunch of "webmasters" dealing with the fact that the job market had shifted out from under them while they weren't looking and rebranding as "developers" whose only tool was Hammer.js, and thinking all their problems could be recontextualized as Nail.js.
UHC denied coverage after the fact for my wife's gall bladder removal surgery because they claimed she was insured with a other carrier through her previous employer. That got straightened out with a couple phone calls, but it was still ridiculous.
Even more ridiculous, though, was the time that they convinced a former insurer of mine to retroactively deny already-paid claims, on the (false) basis that they had been my primary insurer in that time period, only to then deny those same claims when the doctor resubmitted them on the (correct) basis that I had no active policy with them at the time! I suspect that it was a case of a faulty automated system rather than active malice, but the net result was a massive headache for three unrelated parties and a mind boggling amount of paperwork on my part, because they couldn't be bothered to write software that could properly handle the same person having two different policies with a gap between them.
Thrashy @ Thrashy @lemmy.world Posts 3Comments 406Joined 2 yr. ago
It varies from place to place, but the trend is away from them. I recently did a basis-of-design study for another R1 institution, and they said in no uncertain terms that they wanted to decommission the existing central system in their circa-1990 lab tower. Facilities departments often find them to be a PITA to manage and maintain, versus just requiring researchers to neutralize their acid waste before putting it down the sink, or collecting other hazardous waste to be taken away by a service