One thing those are good for is being a call center for white hat hackers. I.e. if you find some holes you can report to those agencies, and they'll take it from there. I know that's what people that speak about their findings on CCC do.
Anthrax is not cultivated by the most invasive specy of the planet, given artificial characteristics to be optimized only for economic incentive, and would have never be allowed by natural selection to have such things as the terminator gene.
I'm not saying nature is good and benevolent, I'm saying there is a difference in having uranium in the ground or in a bomb.
I don't think asking for serious, regular, transparent, independant audit for decades is a bad thing. Or would you let any company deal with uranium without serious follow up ?
> would have never be allowed by natural selection to have such things as the terminator gene
Many eusocial insect species (ants, bees, termites) have sterile worker and soldier castes. In some cases, the soldiers have such enlarged jaws that they are even unable to eat on their own, the workers need to feed them. A sterile soldier unable to eat, that's real natural selection for you.
There is a purpose in that for the colony, so it evolved that way. And of course it took time, and a lot of small adaptive trials, to get there.
There is not purpose in that for the plant, hence it would not have evolved that way. And of course we just made a big leap out of it.
My point with the terminator gene is not about the feature itself, but the concept: we make fast and important changes with very narrow objectives that have zero logic into the system context. It's just for a few people's short term gain.
This is a teleological position, assuming that the end purpose carries intrinsic bearing on the worth of the process that produces that end. It's the same sort of logic behind anti-vax.
Evolution doesn't magically become dangerous just because it's been done in a lab. It's dangerous when it has measurable deleterious effects on biological systems.
> I don't think asking for serious, regular, transparent, independant audit for decades is a bad thing.
You're right! It's a great thing, in fact. That's why there are over 3000 studies on GMO crops so far, with hundreds more happening each year.
Also, I'm a touch baffled by the mention of Terminator genes. 1) They've never existed. There's a patent on it, owned by a company who has pledged to never use it or allow any other company to do so. 2) It solves all the issues regarding drift, which is often a thing anti-GMO folks are concerned about. Never quite understood that.
- most of those studies are used to demonstrate if something is doable. Few are targeting safety, even fewer are long enough or on a large scale enough to answer the previously raised concerned, and almost none are by independent entities.
- GMO have been planted and sold for consumption way before we had proof of short term and scale safety through independent studies. I have zero trust in the will to do the right thing of their manufacturers, either to fund objective studies for long term and large scale or to act humanly if those reveals something bad.
- the terminator gene is just an image I use, really, for the kind of modifications that we can think of, but that would not evolve out of a living system
The "research sponsored by Big $Foo" is also getting a tired meme. By itself, taking in money does not mean research is biased - there needs to be conflict of interest involved. Sometimes it's easy to point it out (e.g. "roundup & cancer" studies with monetary ties to Monsanto), but that doesn't mean every study that was funded by industry is biased. People working there need to get at least some of these things right some of the time; they don't benefit from biasing a study they're using themselves to make sure their product works or meets safety regulations.
One of my post-grad friends was involved in environmental research. He was open (but disappointed) that if they didn't come up with the "right" conclusion there'd be no more funding from "Big $Foo". You may be tired of it, but that's not going to make such blatant conflict of interests go away.
And there's much new fun to be had when you have this many servers around. For example - once you start shuffling around tens of petabytes a day you quickly notice that bit flips are very real. Computers do what we tell them to do with incredibly high probability, but it is always below 1.
Not an expert, but right now I only believe in solar geo-engineering. And, of course, never buying a waterfront property, since at this point we'll almost certainly go above 2*C.
While I agree it sounds like their networking modules cross-talk too much - you still need to store the networking config in some single global service (like a code version control system). And you do need to share across regions some information on cross-region link utilization.
About the intro: how many more people (since Karl Marx) will rediscover the Pareto distribution and come to the conclusion that it should not be the case ...
It's perfectly natural, so many systems follow Pareto. From Wikipedia:
- The sizes of human settlements (few cities, many hamlets/villages)
- File size distribution of Internet traffic which uses the TCP protocol (many smaller files, few larger ones)
- Hard disk drive error rates
- Clusters of Bose–Einstein condensate near absolute zero
- The values of oil reserves in oil fields (a few large fields, many small fields)
- The length distribution in jobs assigned supercomputers (a few large ones, many small ones)
- The standardized price returns on individual stocks
- Sizes of sand particles
- The size of meteorites
- Severity of large casualty losses for certain lines of business such as general liability, commercial auto, and workers compensation.
- Amount of time a user on steam will spend playing different games. (Some games get played a lot, but most get played almost never.)
I will also add popularity of words in a language, and, the most popular instance: individual wealth distribution.
Given that you feel like the Pareto distribution can never be wrong I propose that we model all taxes accordingly.
After all it should be natural that very few people pay most taxes while most pay almost nothing.
Nothing about wealth distribution is natural. With the help of the Pareto distributed political power that installed the system in the first place wealth is controlling itself.
I'm 100% for progressive taxes (i.e. higher taxes on richer people). People should have decent lives even if they can't participate in the workforce/markets with great success.
It's just that the top 50% or top 10% or top 1% or top 0.1% will always hold disproportionate amount of wealth, and no system will change that. Under USSR the select few in the communist party had that wealth, although it wasn't expressed in dollars (or any other currency), but in the power and unquestionability of their decisions.
I'm confused. I simply don't work over 40 hours a week (average), don't want to lower my per-hour salary. Increased compensation for overtime would be the only thing to make me work over 40 hours, I think that's fair. Genuine question: why can't you go home early?
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer; everything in this comment is my opinion and/or based on things that I have found on the internet or vaguely remembered from legal notices posted around my workplace. EDIT: Also this is only about things in the USA--I do not know how it works elsewhere.
Short answer: You can't go home early because if you don't put in the time your employer requires of you they can fire you!
Longer answer: The 40 hour work week is set forth in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). All that the FLSA says is that depending on what kind of work you do, your employer may or may not be required to compensate you for overtime. Your employer is allowed to set your work hour requirements, but if you are considered "non-exempt" from the FLSA, then if you work more than 40 hours your employer is required to provide time-and-a-half compensation for the extra hours worked. Many positions in tech are, I think, generally "exempt" from the FLSA's overtime rule (software dev types, at least--I'm less sure about ops/IT services folks) and therefore employers are not required by law to compensate software developers for overtime.
The FLSA does not address whether or not an employer can require you to work more or less or exactly 40 hours per week; it's all about what obligations they take on if you are non-exempt and they do require you to work more than 40 hours per week.
This is the big way for p-value science to fail, even if every actor is honest. It's obvious once you understand what a p-value is (it literally takes 5 seconds to understand) but nearly nobody does. Even people I've worked with at a FAANG, which you'd expect have an above average understanding of mathematics.
It is a kind of crazy cult - believing that more money simply solves problems, and that we should have full employment. There's extensive historical record on governments going drastically for full employment:
That being said, MMT is also similar to what Japan has done, and it caused neither recession nor growth there. I mean the Japanese central bank owns even equity ETFs, it's kind of insane. And still no results, which is even more insane:
