Therapist have professional standards that include a graduate degree and 1000's of hours of practice with supervision. Maybe a few bad ones fall through the cracks but I would be willing to bet that due to their standards most therapist are professional and do not give 'dangerous' advice or really any advice at all if they are following their professional standards.
This is great work thank you for creating this. There a few times when technical skills can help with national discourse and this is a great example of that.
The dehumanization and persecution of immigrants by the current administration is disgusting and is immoral. I'm glad to see tech being used for good.
I agree with your statement. What I am always trying to understand is where does this lead us and how can we get back to belief in the scientific method? Removing cause/effect/data leaves all decisions to emotion and short term rewards. I don't think this will end well, especially against a background of countries and cultures that do believe in science and collaboration.
Look up the situation in Los Angeles, where a mix of ICE agents and masked unmarked men are targeting Hispanic neighborhoods and taking anyone they believe isn't a citizen (brown). There's been several cases of citizens being taken and detained for weeks. Recently, there's been videos of these men roaming in cars with license plates removed. These men refuse to identify themselves. Its an extremely alarming situation which has, at least in my feeds, not received nearly enough attention.
Cool product! I come from a measurement/calibration background, so I'm curious about the accuracy of your system. Have you tested this against lab equipment, or do you have plans to specify accuracy with proper tolerance intervals?
What about measurement uncertainty and unit-to-unit variability? I know this is consumer hardware, so I dont expect a full blown evaluation but have you characterized expected performance?
I think random selection would be really cool. Imagine if some fraction of our representatives were chosen at random. Not enough to be the majority, maybe something like 1/3, but enough to have a real effect.
The more I think about it, the more I like it. This would allow a sampling of all groups in a country to have access to power and decision making without the need to be exceptional in some way. It would also remove the self-selection bias of all elected officials.
I've been trying to create/produce more but I'm stuck in the consumption mindset. I can't think of what to create. How did you decide what useful things to produce?
In my comment I was using the Constitution and the founding Fathers as symbols for democracy to contrast the current administration which is very anti-democratic.
I understand that the constitution/founding fathers are very flawed - but to most people they still serve as symbols of the core principles of this country. As you've mentioned, if you scratch the surface the reality is very different. If you have better examples that aren't as flawed, I'd genuinely like to hear them.
I feel this way as well. It's a great test to see if the founding fathers got the constitution right and more importantly to see if the people are willing to assert their right to a democracy with the powers spelled out in our constitution.
Another lame attempt at ruling by decree. The CPB was deliberately designed with guardrails to avoid partisanship - the president appoints board members, and no more than five from the same party.
If you've listened to NPR or watched PBS, you know they're about as neutral as you can get while still covering both mainstream sides.
This style of governance is so lazy - instead of working through Congress to change the law, he tries to bully an independent board into doing what he wants. It's also so easy to oppose, the board can just ignore it.
One thing I can't stand about the current administration is just how much they resemble a schoolyard bully. It's never their fault, they are always the victim, and they cry their actions have repercussions. Why is it hostile and political to display the tarriffs to the consumer? Can you imagine how ridiculous it would be if a local politician introduced a new sales tax and then got mad at the businesses for showing the new tax to consumers?
I'm not sure why so many comments think this is a bad idea. I think it's a great idea and should be adopted by all retailers. We already do the same thing with sales tax. Tarriffs are close to sales tax in there effect to consumers so it makes sense to show it up front. It lets customers see just how much more they have to pay due to the, ever changing, tariffs.
This line of thinking is what people are pushing to justify the insane tarriff policy. Amazon is evil, slave labor, they tarriff us, etc. I'm not saying these things aren't true. However, my problem with this argument is that it frames the consumer as a victim to Amazon and to the 'hollowing out of America'. Consumers have a choice - they love using Amazon and importing cheap goods. Where is the self-reflection?
Another lame attempt at subverting the constitution by trying to rule like a king. I hope this order gets challenged and struck down as soon as possible. If the current administration wants lasting change then it should do it the right way, through Congress. He has both houses on his side so why isn't he making things 'great' in a way that's compatible with the constitution?
That's how I feel about it too, the times I've been around layoffs management and the executives all talk about a difficult economic environment and making the organization leaner by firing a bunch of IC's. Never once have I seen a C level say hey we steered the company in the wrong direction its time for new management or hey our CFO failed to communicate the economic environment and caused us to overspend so we're going to look for a new one.
I know it's ridiculous to expect them to blame themselves but the fact that we just accept this lack of accountability from executives/management in the corporate world is insane to me.
I don't know if I'm a top 10% employee, but I'll share how layoffs influenced my decision to leave a job of 5+ years. I started looking for a new role after they announced the layoff of about 200 people in my organization. When I finally got an offer, I kept going back and forth on staying and negotiating or accepting the offer. There were many other reasons why I left, but a huge factor were the layoffs. I just kept thinking, they already had layoffs, what's to stop them from laying me off next? It's also a crappy feeling thinking that you/your team can be on the chopping block at any time.
This is why I cancelled my chatgpt subscription and moved to claude. Its kinda silly, but I feel like the products are about equivalent for my use case so I'd rather do business with a company that is acting in good (better?) faith.
Great article! I really love electro-mechanical designs from the birth of electronics up to the 1960s. Using a little hammer to strike two bells is such a simple, cool, and intuitive design. Today it would be replaced with a piezo buzzer or speaker which works, but isn't nearly as interesting.
You don't really see cool little designs like that anymore - it's all almost all digital now. Though I will say YIGs and RF designs are pretty cool in terms of combining mechanical with electrical elements. Maybe it's just nostalgia, but I miss when electronics weren't so standardized. Tube amps, flip displays, tube displays, etc.
Ya maybe cause you refused to fill out a form that everyone else could fill out just fine. They probably thought you couldn't follow instructions and thought if they can't do this why would we proceed? You ever consider that?
Chaos is exhausting. This also shows the risks of moving fast, the USA is so big that any small change is going to have huge unforeseen consequences. We've seen several examples of this in the last few weeks already.
I sometimes wonder if Fox goes beyond extreme partisanship and into a sort of pavlovian training of their audience. I've watched Fox before and whenever there is a negative or scary story they follow it up with a story about Democrats. At what point does that association get burned into the audience so that Dem\Prog = bad?
What we have to do is offer a hopeful vision of the future that rings true to a majority of people. This starts with breaking away from the current party lines that deny what most people know to be true. For example, almost everyone can agree that health care is too expensive, corporations have too much power, housing is unaffordable, Trump is too extreme, Biden was too old etc. yet neither party is willing to state the obvious. If we can get a major party to do this, or to at least support candidates that do, we can get out of this hole.
Edited first response since it was too reactionary on my part.
Does anybody know whats stopping ethical and slightly less greedy companies from outcompeting these conglomerates? Its a question I keep coming back to because if the market were efficient then competitors should be able to use that same data to undercut big potato (or big whatever). This never seems to happen.
Placing rhetoric in context like you did has a way of cutting through the bs and really getting to the core of what current politicians want covid to be. A minor cold when it was running rampant, and now suddenly a plague. Why could that be? Could it be because during the pandemic it was in their best interest to downplay it while hundreds of thousands died, and now that we've passed it and the USA is facing the rise of a successful nation with a different political system, we need to paint them as the enemy? For what it's worth, the current administration is showing signs of cozying up to nations with weak or non-existent democracies. Just look at the proposed tariffs - they are NOT targeting China but rather Mexico and Canada. Why could that be?
Ultimately the question should be, how can we improve our systems to better respond to future pandemics. Does it matter if it was a lab leak? What will that do for those who died? Will revenge prevent a future pandemic from happening? Viruses and bacteria do not care about their nation of origin, once its out its out.
The war against DEI is clearly over so not that it matters anymore but I have to push back every time I see this sort of comment. DEI, as it relates to hiring, does not and has never meant that people are hired because of their sex or skin color. What it means in practice is that organizations cast a wider net in the search for, and I can't stress this enough, qualified applicants. This wider net has proven to bring forth better candidates to organizations. Also, casting a wider net opens the door for people who are white/asian but come from less traditional backgrounds and/or less prestigious schools to apply as well. Please read up on what DEI truly is before applauding its demise. As scientist, engineers, programmers, and technologists (I assume you are one of those if you are in this forum) we can't blindly believe the propaganda of either side of the political spectrum. In this case, a coordinated effort has deliberately mischaracterized DEI and merit-based hiring as opposites. They are not opposites.
I think this perfectly communicates why it feels so wrong that the government has banned tt. Its an implicit acknowledgement that our leaders feel that foreign influence will resonate with the public in a way that doesn't benefit the status quo.