jltsiren

5 ms·

31.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
US states are sovereign in the sense the term is understood in US constitutional law, but not in the sense used in international law and international politics. They would be autonomous subdivisions of a sovereign state in the latter sense.
32.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
The problem is a lack of funding, which leads to excessive competition and ties continued employment to sustained contributions. Many results are obvious in retrospect, and such results are often the best ones. The difficult part with such
33.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
That's mostly a feature of elections with single-member districts or other winner-take-all mechanisms. Every successful politician must have a wide coalition behind them, and marginal groups that could back either major candidate deter
34.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
It's a non-immigrant visa, because the law uses "immigrant" as a technical term that does not match the common usage. For international comparisons, it makes more sense to say that H-1B is an initial immigrant visa that grant
35.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
The rivers in that area are pretty small. You would have to block them for days before there is a risk of a massive flash flood. From what I've understood, the collapsing glacier either contained enough liquid water or melted enough fr
36.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
> And my degree from the social side didn't include statistics. In the university I went to, Department of Statistics used to be part of the Faculty of Social Sciences. It was impossible to graduate from social sciences without taki
37.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
You can't generalize from your personal experience to the rest of academia. There is far too much variation between fields, institutions, and countries as well as over time. ML in particular is an extreme outlier due to amount of money
38.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
SSD controller is on the same die, but the actual SSDs in a Mac Studio are slotted and technically upgradeable. Storage bandwidth generally matches NVMe drives of the same generation, as Apple is ultimately using the same NAND modules over
39.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
And there have been plenty of times when the armed thugs have staged a coup and overthrown their masters. In the absence of civic order, personal relationships between the elites are what matters. Your thugs can easily take everything you o
40.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
Fringe groups tend to start new political parties in the Finnish system. There are still two communist parties left, both offshoots of the pro-Soviet minority of the original communist party. One of them even has the official status of a po
41.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
I disagree. When I moved from Finland to the US, I was surprised to find how popular actual "abolish private property" style socialism was among young Americans. I hanged out with leftist people when I was a student, and I kind of
42.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
That's just the established naming convention. For brown bears, you have parvorder Ursida, superfamily Ursoidea, family Ursidae, subfamily Ursinae, tribe Ursini, genus Ursus, and finally species Ursus arctos. When there are millions of
43.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
The moral justification for meritocracy is that the society benefits when the most capable people are in charge. Which means the society should find the children with the most potential and give them the best education and other opportuniti
44.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
(Upper) middle class culture, where parents try to give their children a favorable start in life, which often involves a lot of effort. Such as buying a home in a good school district or helping them gain admission to a good university.
45.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
You may have heard the joke that polyamory is wrong, because it should be multiamory or polyphilia. Meritocracy is a similar case. Because the word mixes Latin and Greek roots, it's unlikely to be old. The first recorded uses of "
46.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
I noticed another thing a long time ago. Some academic cultures have a tradition of formal debates. They are based on the premise that an educated person should be able to argue convincingly for or against any idea, regardless of whether th
47.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
My point was that you can usually pronounce foreign words in your native language, if the alphabet is the same and your language has a straightforward mapping between spelling and pronunciation. And then you can derive the spelling from tha
48.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
Meänkieli split from what became the Torne Valley dialects of Finnish in 1809, when an international border suddenly appeared in the middle of the region. To a Finnish speaker it sounds like a bit old-fashioned dialect, but it's mostly
49.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
I think your actual issue is that spelling and pronunciation are too inconsistent in your native language. With a more consistent language, it's pretty easy to remember foreign words and names using the pronunciation in your native lan
50.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
The same probably holds without AI. China is still in the stage of development, where people reasonably expect that the future will be better. The West has not really been optimistic about the future since the 90s. There is always something
51.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
Big pharma is not like Bell Labs of old. Their researchers are expected to do work their bosses consider productive. They have no need for people who want to do curiosity-driven research and release the results to the public.
52.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
More power, with a greater personal risk. I've received some individual grants from private foundations in another country. Those grants were essentially unconditional gifts, as there were some tax benefits with such grants. I could ha
53.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
The Western European political system mostly depends on the center-right and the center-left working together and making compromises to reduce the support for more radical parties on the other side. During the Cold War, social democrats wer
54.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
Household waste recycling mostly works if you sort the materials at source. If you have separate bins for glass, metal, and paper+cardboard, all of them can be recycled economically. Plastic recycling only works for industrial waste, as you
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by jltsiren 2mo ago
Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants. In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they
56.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
The actual Finnish kid who wrote a somewhat successful OS kernel was born in Helsinki, to an upper middle class family with a communist father. He chose to study in the most prestigious university in the country, largely due to his family t
57.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
I had two main points. First, employers favor applicants from prestigious schools over those from less prestigious schools, because prestigious schools are more selective. That seems to be at least as true in the US as in Finland. Second, t
58.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
Two points: There are two kinds of engineers in Finland. Some received a more theoretical education at research universities. Most went to more applied institutions that focus more on practical skills. Regardless of what employers say, they
59.
by jltsiren 2mo ago
That's survivorship bias. If there are truly unique people who never get a chance to do what they would be good at, we don't hear about them. Private sector bureaucrats are no different from government ones. The fundamental issue
60.
by jltsiren 3mo ago
Incidentally, Finland just took a key step today towards issuing an operating permit for the Onkalo repository. After today, the permit is mostly matter of bureaucracy, and the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel could start by the end of

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