mhneu

The key thing is time horizon.

Bell Labs invested in research that would bring payoff 20+ years in the future. That's in part because they were a quasi-monopoly. (Also because there was less pressure back then on execs to focus on short-term stock prices.)

It's also because Bell Labs ran a lot on government contracts and grants. The government CAN look 20+ years in the future. And it does.

You can see the same effect in pharma today. Pharma R&D develops drugs that will hit the clinic in the next 5-10 years at most. The true basic research of identifying targets and understanding cancer/Alzheimer's mechanisms to launch future drugs -- that's all funded by the government.

Context: This is about the FCC.

More from The Verge in Nov https://www.theverge.com/23437518/biden-fcc-gigi-sohn-fox-ne...

Today, we’re just talking about a problem. That problem is the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is currently short a commissioner, and the Biden administration and Senate Democrats just can’t seem to get that seat filled despite having nominated an amazingly qualified person. Her name is Gigi Sohn. The inability to get Gigi confirmed at the FCC has left the commission deadlocked with two Democrats and two Republicans. That means the commission in charge of regulating all telecom in the United States, including how you get your internet service, is unable to get much done. And the Biden administration can’t accomplish some of its biggest policy priorities, like expanding rural broadband and restoring net neutrality.

There's also NIH which does lots of computational biology and medicine:

https://datascience.nih.gov/

https://hr.nih.gov/jobs

https://irp.nih.gov/

Yes. Abrams presided over the plea on Dec 19. Now Kaplan has the case.

Abrams' husband works at Davis Polk, but Davis Polk (firm w/ ~1000 attorneys) has represented FTX in the past. It's pretty typical for these sorts of conflicts to arise, and in this case it's probably best to remove any sniff of a perceived conflict by Abrams stepping aside. Nothing here is going to be controversial -- though our federal courts are currently going through serious turmoil due to events of last few years, albeit not really SDNY and the 2nd Circuit is mostly normal too.

The maximum total is not the realistic maximum that she would get if tried. Criminal offense category, concurrent sentences, and criminal history all need to be taken into account.

Before judge Ronnie Abrams, an Obama judge.

Duopoly. Plus cost of switching away once you sign up.

Network effects and monopolistic (anti-competitive) features allow bad companies to survive today. Monopolistic practices are probably a worse problem today than in the 1920s.

In the 1920s governments used regulation to break up huge firms and defeat advantages due to cost of capital (hard to start a new railroad in the 20s because the cost of trains and tracks was just so high.) Today, cost of capital is relatively less important, and things like switching cost and bundling and people valuing their time and convenience are bigger factors. We need anti-trust/government regulation to address those.

(For example, in the case of password managers, imagine if there were laws requiring publicized security audits and seamless migration to a new service of customer's choice. A competitor to Lastpass might have arrived by now.

the improvements have come in confinement and fuel

if this approach works, you'll see laser innovation over time to improve energy per shot. You'll also see engineering to contain the released neutrons so everything in there doesn't get made radioactive.

Maximus / Squish Fido sysop here.

Long ran on a 300 baud modem (I think it was one bit per transition!.) Upgraded to a 2400 baud Hayes smartmodem full-duplex (V22bis!) and eventually a 14.4k Zyxel running some strange proprietary protocol with asymmetric channels. If I remember correctly, it's been a long long time.

Did anyone else's sister intentionally pick up other phone lines regularly to ditch the modem transfers so she could talk on the phone?

PCBoard was too expensive for me at the time

The context of when and why (and to who) asbestos causes cancer is simply ignored.

Asbestos causes a very, very nasty cancer - mesothelioma - that causes almost certain death. Painful death. With a very bad prognosis. And mesothelioma is caused mainly by asbestos.

There's a reason why we purged asbestos. No one wants to get mesothelioma.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/malignant-mesothelioma/causes-...

The main risk factor for pleural mesothelioma is exposure to asbestos. In fact, most cases of pleural mesothelioma have been linked to high levels of asbestos exposure, usually in the workplace.

Note that talc is a mineral crystal/fiber a little like asbestos, and talc is connected to ovarian/uterine cancer. Let's not play around with dusty tiny pieces of rock, they seem to be bad for our bodies.

Author is Arthur Brooks, longtime head of AEI. https://www.npr.org/2018/05/15/611199663/arthur-brooks-head-...

So great!

Today, this wouldn't even be possible - Newsweek doesn't even have a print edition.

(Also, just as bad: Newsweek is now a zombie publication who sold its name and trademark and has become a fairly right-wing operation)

https://newrepublic.com/article/158968/newsweek-rise-zombie-...

Amid a larger reckoning about the role of journalism in legitimizing anti-democratic ideas, Newsweek had largely stayed out of notice until Eastman’s op-ed. Newsweek claims that it is just asking questions, but its faux innocence is undercut by Hammer’s credentials and the ideological tilt of most of its contributors. Newsweek, the magazine you once read at the dentist, is like a [...] version of the opinion section of The Wall Street Journal.

Toyota just released their first EV and it was developed in a collaboration with Subaru.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterlyon/2021/06/29/at-last-to...

This is important work, and this award choice is a good one.

Dictators lie about everything.

Modern (semi)fascism is built on lying. What we are seeing is co-option of liberal democracies by a minority of wealthy oligarchs that have to lie to voters in those democracies.

By contrast, parties that embrace rule-of-law democracy lie much less than rightwing/fascist parties. Rule-of-law democracy is based on truthful public speech and an independent press -- to reduce lying.

Yes, exactly. Toyota is refusing to take the L on this because Toyota is the market leader in gas-electric hybrids and Toyota is not the market leader in EVs. This is business strategy 101.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/25/climate/toyota-electric-h...

"Toyota Led on Clean Cars. Now It Works to Delay Them." The auto giant bet on hydrogen power, but as the world moves toward electric the company is fighting climate regulations in an apparent effort to buy time.

This is all very clear business strategy. And we shouldn't let Toyota get in the way of a better world for all of us, in exchange for profit for its investors.

Let's be clear.

The reason Toyota isn't all-in on EVs is because Toyota is the dominant player in a rival technology: gas-electric hybrids.

This is extremely clear business strategy: Toyota doesn't want to cannibalize its marketshare in hybrids.

Toyota pushed hydrogen fuel cells for years to obstruct EV adoption, just as Elon Musk pushed hyperloop to obstruct high-speed rail adoption. Both hydrogen and hyperloop are fantasy technology: decades away or completely impractical (hyperloop.)

Only after EVs were widely adopted in many countries did Toyota start moving towards EVs. That was a logical business strategy for them.

Toyota isn't all in on EVs because they make lots of money from hybrids. The end.

It's not just the word liberal, which means something different for most Americans than its meaning in other countries. In Australia, the Liberal party is the conservatives who are allied with Murdoch.

The word "neoliberal" is also a problem. It is used negatively and aimed at a broad swath of center-left to center-right.

But in other countries, the people called "neoliberals" would be understood to be conservatives. Instead of using "n*liberals", we should be calling them "conservatives". Larry Summers, for example, is a conservative.

Volokh is a conservative attorney who is intellectually aligned with the 5th circuit judges who wrote this opinion.

A few other sources:

- Lawrence Tribe, a very senior center-left constitutional lawyer and Harvard prof: https://twitter.com/tribelaw/status/1562951505451266050

"A disgraceful Fifth Circuit decision"

- Reporters' Committee on Freedom of the Press (a deeply centrist/neutral organization) https://twitter.com/katie_rcfp/status/1570897188359909377

"Just finished reading the 5th Circuit’s decision in the NetChoice v. Paxton case and it’s . . . not good. To say the First Amendment analysis is deeply flawed would be an understatement."

- Orin Kerr, a conservative attorney who's also been a Federalist Society backer: https://twitter.com/OrinKerr/status/1570900354061180929

"I am old-fashioned, but I would think that inferior courts start with what the Supreme Court has said the text means."

(I did a quick search and found three sources that span the ideological spectrum, which show how widespread the negativity about this decision has been.)

This is a terribly-reasoned decision that doesn't make much legal sense. It's an ideological decision, motivated by the feeling that rightwing voices, which are actually boosted by the rich people that own social media, are instead, against all sense, suppressed.

Agree (on sentence 2 and 3.) Gödel, Escher, Bach doesn't go very deep.

This was what Andy Grove wanted - more investment in chip manufacturing. Good news.

Grove was a visionary in many ways and his writing on this back in 2010 or so impacted my thinking.

https://prospect.org/environment/andy-grove-trade-globalizat...

In retirement, Grove became concerned about the decline of American manufacturing: When he was CEO, Intel not only performed its research and development in the United States, but its manufacturing as well. He was greatly disturbed that more and more American companies produced their products abroad. Concerned about the erosion of the American middle class, he also helped Service Employee International Union leaders Andy Stern and David Rolf conceptualize new ways that the American labor movement might once again flourish.

This is true for large digital integrated circuits.

There's also analog fabs, MEMS fabs, LED/photo/laser fabs.

Places like Analog still have smaller fabs like that. Those fabs also seem likely to create technological progress into the future, and so the US should be funding those too.

Unlikely, because many states then cut those assistance programs when given the opportunity. It's more likely that the 'state' argument is a way to achieve their ideological ends (cutting the program.)

That said, this bill is a very positive development. Investing in local manufacturing and R&D is a great idea, and it will help the economy. Hopefully it will efficient and money will not be captured by rent-seekers or cronyism.

Rupert Murdoch's WSJ. Just be a little careful as Murdoch has pressured/selected editors that will spin news in the way he wants.

Yes. The issue is that security and privacy are tragedies of the commons. Individuals rarely have the time or skill to improve the situation, and it's almost never rational for individuals to do so — the benefit to them is probabilistic and low-probability, and the cost in hours of time is high.

But the benefit to society is great of doing better on security and privacy.

This is why governments should regulate security and privacy. The whole point of governments is to solve collective problems together.

It's really been a mistake for the Python core team to not figure out a better way of integration with numpy. I'm pretty sure back in the 2000s the numpy team was ready to do work on this.

Syntax integration would be great. It's such a hassle to learn two syntaxes and two data/object models to work with numpy -- as inevitably your code converts from Python objects <-> numpy objects at some point (singletons!), and it makes learners' lives much more difficult than needed.

many, many people making good-faith, rational decisions which in hindsight proved foolish.

Rational, yes, but rational only in the sense of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid".

My experience is many MBS and finance people, during 2003-2008, knew that a ton of debt was garbage, that LTCM's blowup in 1998 showed massive structural weakness that was never repaired, and that a crash was going to come SOMETIME.

But the problem is that the rational decision in such a market is to keep investing and making money on the irrational rise, because no one knows when the crash will come or how bad it will be. It's actually rational to keep buying trash debt when the crash timing is unpredictable.

In the end, the finance people were actually correct to keep buying –– the gov't (that is, me you and every US taxpayer) bailed them out, and most of the traders did come out ahead after a bit of time.

Corporations like Facebook and Google do far more surveillance of any citizen than the government does. Surveillance capitalism. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/03/harvard-profe...

Russia surveilles its citizens mostly any way it wants. The US government has more controls (as long as the US remains a democracy.) The Church Committee actually made real reforms.

And sadly, everything that Snowden writes now is approved by the Russian intelligence services. You can decide how that influences what you think of his writing.

“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” -Elie Wiesel

Choosing to not discuss politics is fine. But if you do that, you’re making a choice: you’re choosing to take the side of those who prefer political decisions to be made by a small elite, without feedback from people like us. You’re choosing not to weigh in.