I haven't yet seen a compelling reason to think it is either Chinese or an espionage craft anyway,other than news reporting "the Pentagon sure thinks so"
It is strange, to me, to make a caveat about how some peoples' taste might appreciate the buildings just shown, and then immediately launch into a "universal" principle for why those examples "look bad". The one statement puts a lie to the other, but the piece just carries on as if it didn't seriously undermine its own premise.
Conflating a holistic approach that acknowledges the material effect of the context around a person with the assertion that those things existing nullifies the contribution of said person's agency is one of the very stupidest contributions of individualism to society. Things can materially make abuse more likely. Actions can be taken _by society_ that will make any particular _individual_ abuse less likely, whatever the specifics in each individual situation. It is still largely effort by an abuser and their closest contacts that will make _specific, individual_ abuse less likely in the future. None of these analyses contradict.
"investigating systems in their totality rather than focusing on isolated interactions within them" is not inherently conspiratorial. It's far weirder to suggest that "more people want to party for no particular reason" or "more doctors prescribe pain meds for no particular reason" than it is to suggest reasons that might contribute (say, "more people are suffering from chronic pain than before as the disparity between productivity and wage has widened" or "pharmaceutical companies are naturally incentivized to sell as much of their product as possible and those incentives may occasionally drive morally dubious decisions").
I just want to pipe in with a personal standout from when I used to play more IF, which is _King of Shreds and Patches_, Lovecraft in the London of Shakespeare, and worth a playthrough.
The problem with "energy too cheap to meter" is that it has to very quickly become "energy too cheap to make a profit from". And that is the _real_ obstacle to prolific nuclear.
You are treating "because it doesn't generate profit" and "because it's obsolete" as equivalent conditions. This is pretty normal, but let me suggest that the two don't have to exist together, because the market is, in fact, not a dispassionate force of nature but a creation by men to serve the needs of a subset of those men. In this particular case, even, it is a market that has decided to keep the secondary costs of nuclear associated with its generation, while dramatically underweighting the secondary costs of fossil fuels, even though the latter kills more people per month than have ever died from any nuclear event or waste in the entire lifetime of the tech.
But even from there, nuclear is constantly under development. Its leading edge is miles beyond the nuclear of the generation when it was being built out commonly in the US, and the new tech is both very safe and produces way more manageable waste output. China is building both more nuclear and more renewable energy than any other country in the world, and is just one place showing that that the combination is a viable way of meeting our needs.
Put another way, I do think you're right when you say (lack od) profitability is the major problem. But I think, given a frank assessment of the technology (preferably from sources not funded by people with an interest in maintaining the status quo), we should consider seriously that the problem isn't nuclear tech, but the concept of profit, itself.
Nuclear definitely needs to be a larger part of our energy future. This article briefly alludes to its "social and political" challenges, but that undersells how nuclear is subject to more impact study per watt than any fossil fuel plant ever has. But the basis of that is simple economics: an economy dominated by fossil fuels (with an increasing share coming from "green" tech that will still always need a reliable base load that fossil fuels will be happy to provide) will spend large amounts of effort minimizing the benefits of a tech whose RoI to the owner is measured over tens of decades.
For the unfamiliar, dialectical materialism tends to do this a lot (that is, understand and explain exploitative facets of our economy long before mainstream press gives the particular problem in question any notice).
Agree, this sounds like no less of an attempt to own the employee's time, it's just better at recognizing the value of open-source contribution to Alphabet's bottom line.
There's a switching cost inherent to employment that some people simply can't or won't risk. The only way to give people total freedom to accept or not accept a policy like this is to make it so their fundamental needs are already met.
It's a sign of how crazy our society is that you have to work this hard to frame (and justify) a question that is essentially, "How do I reverse the coercive impact companies have on wage to get more of the real value of my time?"
That's only true in that particular hypothetical. There are a lot of possible circumstances without such a clear conflict of interest.
Also, in the lawyer example, someone's freedom or livelihood is on the line. In the company example, it's a company's profits, which has a much less clear relationship to either of those two things, especially in today's world of 250:1 salary ratios.
MIT ends up just as political, it just does so by assuming society's default politics. It "just so happens" those default politics are great for billionaires.
I can't help but read this article dwell on how everyone but Ken stated their misgivings about the deal. If ownership and decision-making of the company were more equitable, then this specific decision would have gone the opposite way, and thousands of people might have had chance at a better outcome from deciding to work for them.
Pretty sure all the comments above you are intimating is that there's no such thing as "better designed" without a "to what (specific) goal?". If the goal was enjoyment, then Sierra games were well-loved by lots of people, and like the guy says, that's proof by itself that the design goal was met. You can (and Maher does) argue that there are ways to take frustration out of the experience, or highlight other parts of the experience more (parts that people generally find enjoyable), but that still doesn't allow an authoritative, non-subjective, statement about "better" without some sort of qualifier.
So that brings us to the next question: Why on earth are we putting the entirety of those (business) life and death decisionsinto the hands of essentially a single person? Why is the effort not spread out over a broad swath of management-capable people at all levels of the company, when we're against monarchy in so many other aspects of life?
>First of “neurotic” is a psychological term. He was using it in the scientific way, not the colloquial way.
Whether or not it was used scientifically doesn't mean much. If I say all HN users named amw have been shown to be sociopaths, does that remove the social burden of the negative association with sociopathy even though I'm specifically referring to the diagnosis from DSM IV?
To the rest: Yes, Damore was making the point that not all women can be programmers. And he was making it with pseudoscience and "intuitive" beliefs that haven't really been shown to have any backing in the essentialist way that he and other apologists have shown them. It's kind of like saying that Charles Murray is "just" demonstrating that professional work just isn't for black people thanks to the "scientific" differences in their IQ: He's not "just" demonstrating anything, he's cherry-picking science for a conclusion he likes, a conclusion that happens to be inherently (and needlessly) discriminatory.
The backlash against Crichton was well-founded. He used the grain of truth that it's sometimes hard to get new ideas in science funded to build a crazy denialist foundation on that made for exciting fiction, but terrible description of reality.
I agree that the title is pure clickbait, I disagree that the article completely divorces itself from the premise the title implies. This whole thing where science journalism drums up this huge controversy after the fact when enough science on a topic has been performed to think that maybe a particular explanation is a bad one is a symptom of organizations that have to drum up a saucy narrative to sell.
It is perfectly natural to fund science that seems like a good idea at the time, and not fund ideas that seem less plausible than the prevailing explanation, and while it does suck that it takes a while to overturn the idea that the idea is good, representing our 20/20 hindsight as some irredeemable inertia with conspiracist overtones is a big problem.
They went "all in" on science, that happens with hindsight to maybe not have been an accurate model for reality. Nobody can know that a particular explanation is bad without actually doing the science first, no matter what post facto explanations we can come up with after we realize we've been chasing a unicorn.
I have a huge problem with someone who says, "We should just make compensation merit-based rather than based on accidents of birth", because it refuses to acknowledge that we already live in that system. It's just that the "merit" is stuff that happens to correlate strongly to accidents of birth (like IQ, speaking the "correct" dialect, being well-educated, and so forth).
It turns into, "our system is broken, we need to system _harder_", and is just as much nonsense.
There's a difference between "conspiracy" and "class solidarity among the wealthy". You're totally right that it's probably silly to attribute this to all management/ownership explicitly collaborating together on a scheme they're keeping secret from the workers, but I'd argue that the comment you're responding to is also totally right to point out that things can structurally support each other in a way that ultimately ends up being a small group of rich people working to keep a larger group of poor people poor, simply because all the small incentives for the individual decisions can support the larger structural whole. We can still attribute that as "wealthy people promulgate a narrative to inspire false hope" in a meaningful way, as long as we don't take it from an individualist frame.
It feels an awful lot like the people putting out this statement want to position themselves as the actual driving force behind the focus on shareholder value in the 80s, and thus use that branding to also posit an authority to change future corporate governance in a way that accommodates the current political climate. It's absurd to think that they would have that kind of power, but that aspect of it is probably harmless in the long run; I think the bigger concern is how this statement can be used and incorporated as a bigger vision for governance that appears to address fundamental problems with the way our economy is run without actually addressing them, much the way a focus on plastic straws lets people feel like they're addressing ocean plastic without actually addressing it.
The result of successful banking API fraud is "I get a lot of money". The result of successful science publication fraud is, "I get some papers published, and as long as I don't get too famous and people don't look too hard at replicating my results later, maybe I get to include them in a bibliography or resume somewhere".