It's as if we reincarnated oil barons from the early 1900s and appointed them all to lead the government without telling them it was 2017.

The weirdest part of it all is how these folks are now on the sharp end of capitalism. They're rapidly being dismantled at a more local level by on-site generation, which simply needs less global infrastructure to meet demand.

So now we have these folks with massive empires largely based on the promise of future capital, with heavily leveraged current holdings. They have incentive to act against efficiency and the market to preserve the investments they made. In any other scenario folks would probably say that they "deserve to lose".

I wish the climate change alarmists could realize that 90% of what they're freaking out about is a non-problem. It'd just take a small amount of focused investment (cogeneration and AC time-shifting tech, etc) to make the energy industry obsolete.

The energy industry is fighting against both economics and ecology to maintain dominance. It does so for lots of reasons. It has no right to exist.

I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLoS model is much better in a lot of ways. Maybe not worse, but maybe not better.

Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations.

My experience with the second model is that there are organizations that would like to run things that way, but run into problems with copyediting, layout and design, and reviewing infrastructure. They kind of think it's something they can just do on the fly but as they do it they realize it's more work. Maybe a company that just provides the tools is the way to go, but at some point that would probably basically become a publisher.

I'm somewhat hopeful about stuff like "arxiv overlay journals". E.g. see description at http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/for-authors

Thinks like approval or rank voting, for example.

I don't understand why these minor changes don't get implemented.

It's obvious this guy had a love of math and ability in it, from his majors and subsequent events.

But it's also actually not that unreasonable for him to start second-guessing himself when he struggled with math earlier in life.

I do think there's this idea that if you're good at math and have something to offer in it, it will show early on regardless of life circumstances or mentors or role models or whatever, that if it's not immediately obvious that you're a mathematical genius you should forget about it.

"Realizing a test you took in elementary school needn't define you" is actually a nontrivial thing to overcome in today's society, maybe even especially in STEM circles.

Sometimes I wish STEM culture was more focused on sharing the joys of STEM and trying to be as open-minded and inclusive as possible, instead of brandishing it as a competitive tool.

Yes, we definitely treat STEM as a competition to see who can be the closest to "perfect" at set tasks and classwork, rather than as an exploration (or even exploitation) of structures and spaces through strictly logical reasoning.

As I was thinking about it, though, I'm not surprised NumPy hasn't been funded before. The reasons why say a lot about biases in memory.

It wasn't that long ago that the sorts of things NumPy does were seen as fairly niche, and in the domain of statistics or engineering. It's only with relatively recent interest in AI and DL that this has been seen as within the purview of Silicon Valley-comp sci-type business, as opposed to EE or something different. I still am kind of a little disoriented--the other day, looking through our university's course catalog, I realized that certain topics that would have been taught in the stats or psychology departments are now being seen as the territory of comp sci. Statisticians have written excoriations about being treated as if they don't exist, as comp sci blithely barrels forward, reinventing the wheel.

I'm not meaning to take sides with these issues, only pointing out that I think the world we live in was very different not so long ago. It might seem puzzling that NumPy hasn't had more funding, but I think that's in part because what it's most profitably used for now wasn't really seen as much more than academic science fiction not too long ago.

The other part of it too, is that until relatively recently, if you were to do numerical heavy lifting, you'd almost certainly be expected to do that in C/C++ or maybe Fortran. There's a tension in numerical computing, between the performance and expressiveness that's needed, and Python is on one end of that continuum, far from the end that is traditionally associated with complex numerical computing. Sure, you had things like MATLAB with Python in the same functional role, but those were largely seen as teaching tools, or something that engineers did for one-off projects, having learned to do that in school (I still think the use of python in ML derives from the use of Python as a teaching tool in uni).

I'm not trying to knock Python or NumPy or anything, just kind of trying to convey a different perspective, which is that I can remember a time not too long ago when the use of Python in numerics was seen as primarily didactic in nature, or for limited circumscribed applications.

FWIW, it seems to me Python is kind of on a path similar to what happened with javascript, which was treated as kind of an ancillary helper language on the web, until Google started pushing its limits. Then there was browser wars 2.0, and huge efforts put into javascript, and it became a main player in network computing. To me, there's a similar trend with Python: it really kind of existed as a language for prototyping and scripting tasks, and now finds itself in a different role than it has been used for traditionally, and projects in that area are getting an influx of money accordingly. What I see happening is (1) a blossoming diversity of numerical computing communities (Haskell, Python, Julia, Kotlin, Scala, Rust, Go, etc.), due to competition and variation in application scenarios and preferences, (2) a huge influx of resources being put into Python to make it more performant, or (3) people jumping ship from Python into one of those other platforms to get more bang-for-the buck [or (4) some combination of all of these.]

Approval voting or ranking are almost universally agreed to be better than what we have (in most places--some places do have that). That alone would make a huge change.

Independent districting commissions would be a big step forward.

Election day holidays would help.

Actually, a lot of the stuff in this proposed bill would help.

You're right that there's open questions out there, but it's not like there aren't solutions that are obvious first steps.

Re: healthcare, I think that's probably even more complicated than electoral reform. For example, missing from your example are cost-cutting measures, like requiring more transparency in pricing and charging, and deregulating certain things to increase competition.

In my university, for example, the library pushes hard for movement toward open public standards. I've also seen junior faculty make efforts to publish in open journals. But then those junior faculty get slammed by [some] senior faculty for not publishing in higher profile journals and not having enough of an impact factor.

There's also a lot of legitimate grievances against open journals, due to the financial incentives that are created and the types of review processes that are encouraged by their policies.

So there's a chicken-and-egg factor and a lot of disagreement about what should be happening.

Personally, I think there should be a huge shift in publishing practices in academics, but it's going to take some time.

There's some cognitive decline, but it tends to start after 25 or so, and it's mostly associated with slowed speed per se rather than learning ability. There's also some controversy in that the declines might be associated with serious health conditions, that are associated with age, rather than age per se.

The other things you mention either stay the same or increase with age, which strikes people as kind of counter-intuitive, which speaks to stereotypes people have.

I know from personal experience that this issue and related issues have become very salient to farmers and those around them. It's not a small issue. When your livelihood depends on a very expensive piece of machinery, being able to repair it yourself (or have it repaired by whomever you want) is important, and farmers are talking to their friends and family about it. They're being screwed, and all they want to do is farm.

Also, this issue is bigger than what it nominally seems, because it affects equipment dealers and mechanics as well. I know dealers who are pissed as hell at Deere--they feel stabbed in the back by them because of this stuff.

This repair stuff is also the tip of the iceberg in terms of Deere's behavior lately too. Many people I know would list the right-to-repair issue as just one in a list of grievances they have against Deere. Over the last decade or so, there's been a huge shift in Deere's behavior, and they've really become kind of monopolistic in their general orientation toward who they deal with. This has angered a lot of people. I suspect the right-to-repair in rural Republican areas might be a kind of symbolic issue, representative of much broader anger at Deere.

It doesn't matter if insurance is private or public if the costs of healthcare are too high. I don't see why there is no compromise. It's very bad for the future of this country.