jltsiren

41 ms·

721.
by jltsiren 2y ago
It doesn't work like that. NIH grants are awarded in terms of direct costs, and indirect costs come on top of that. If you have a $500k/year grant and your university has negotiated 69% overhead rate, NIH pays the university $845k
722.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Finland. Back when I was in the job market and looking for a permanent position, we had a rather silly government that did poorly justified budget cuts. Academic positions were scarce at the time. I was looking for a position in Europe, but
723.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Salaries must be weighted by risk. Right now, there is a high risk that researchers funded by grants or working in government labs will lose their jobs and faculty will lose their grants and labs. Industry researchers are in a more stable s
724.
by jltsiren 2y ago
If you have dealt with countries like Russia, one idea that can be useful for understanding them is oligarchic capitalism. That the purpose of the economy is to benefit the elites. That the share of wealth that goes to the common people is
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by jltsiren 2y ago
I don't think it's that simple. Things that can be produced with machines rather than labor have become more affordable over time. Electronics, travel, clothes, and even food are cheaper than they used to be relative to wages. The
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by jltsiren 2y ago
This will mostly just weaken America. Europe can defend itself against Russia just fine. Maybe it will be a bit poorer, as it has to spend more money on defense, but it can do that. The bigger threat is that European countries start fightin
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by jltsiren 2y ago
This is unnecessary nitpicking. You can easily derive a logical contradiction of your choice by assuming that a system that can be formally modeled can prove something that cannot be proven within a formal system. If a specific theorem does
728.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I'd say it was the decline and fall of the Soviet block. Without the external pressure to remain competitive, the balance shifted from realism towards ideology.
729.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Chat UI can be intuitive if it sees the context. If you can make single-sentence queries and the AI understands enough of the context to guess what you actually meant and to extrapolate the details, it can be very powerful. But if you actua
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Payments for making past discoveries public create terrible incentives. They encourage you to keep your discoveries secret until someone is willing to pay enough for them. If your discovery is not particularly valuable on its own, but someo
731.
by jltsiren 2y ago
A short-term curfew is a minor inconvenience. Something unexpected happened, and now you have to adjust your routines for a day or two. Being able to deal with such inconveniences without making them a bigger issue than they are is an essen
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Universities don't do research. Individuals affiliated with the university do. The usual deal is that the individuals own the results. If they want to commercialize the results, then the university (and possibly the funders) get a shar
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by jltsiren 2y ago
While the actual risk is minimal, countries do have reach beyond their borders. For example, if you ever leave your home country to visit a third country, that country could arrest you and extradite you to the country that doesn't like
734.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I don't see how your reply is related to my comment. I was not defining democracy. I was describing the common real-world usage of the term, which has a more specific meaning than simple majority rule. It is commonly used as a shorthan
735.
by jltsiren 2y ago
This is based on a too literal interpretation of democracy. Democracy had a bad reputation in the ancient world, because unconstrained majority decisions often led to terrible outcomes. In the modern world, democracy usually means liberal d
736.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Of a world, not necessarily the real world. One of the main drawbacks of philosophical rationalism is a mind's ability do deceive itself with constructs that sound plausible and are consistent with the world model. A healthy dose of em
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by jltsiren 2y ago
When a major nuclear disaster happens, it can cause hundreds of billions of damage. To make it worse from a liability perspective, that damage can be attributed to a specific power plant. We know from natural disasters that insurance is usu
738.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I think Musk is more like Prigozhin of the US. The people in power tolerate him as long as he remains useful. But when he overextends himself, his private jet may have an accident or he may fall from the window of his underground bunker.
739.
by jltsiren 2y ago
It depends on the map. In the Civ 6 Europe map, the area where the Normandy landings took place was 3 tiles. You could have three units attacking in the initial wave against 1 defending unit, with various ranged units on both sides. At that
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Normandy was not a death stack. The actual landings involved 156k troops facing 50k troops over 80 km of coastline. That's maybe 2x as many troops as in a major ancient battle, stretched over a frontline 20x as long. WW2 battles were p
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by jltsiren 2y ago
Increasing government efficiency is not difficult. It just takes time, and there are no quick victories. And in most cases, you need to spend more money in the short term. The key actor is the legislative branch. It can set goals and priori
742.
by jltsiren 2y ago
It doesn't make sense if you are not rich. Completing a PhD typically takes 5-7 years in the US. In my public university, the nominal tuition for that time would be $100-150k for in-state students and $180-250k for others. Then add liv
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by jltsiren 2y ago
A nominal 2% budget cut is a 5-6% real cut, assuming average wage growth and inflation. And if that cut meant going back to where the budget was 1-2 years earlier, the university had already faced effective budget cuts over those years.
744.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Tuition is also used to pay the supervisor. Direct one-on-one mentoring by a tenured / tenure-track professor is more expensive than classes, which are often taught by adjuncts.
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by jltsiren 2y ago
The big question is how should the government allocate the funding for basic research between career stages to maximize the benefit to the society. If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you get a steady stream of new peo
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by jltsiren 2y ago
It's almost as expensive to hire a PhD student as a postdoc. A postdoc makes something close to the median wage. While not great, it's enough that people in general are expected to buy homes and start families with incomes like th
747.
by jltsiren 2y ago
If a tech company has to make rapid cuts, it will lay off engineers. This is basically the same situation. Administrators usually exist for specific reasons. As long as those reasons remain, it's difficult to cut administrators. If the
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by jltsiren 2y ago
There is more to it than a simple dichotomy into gamified RPGs with complex rules and rules-light games focusing on role-playing. There were some rules-light games in the 90s, appealing to a different kind of people than D&D. Vampire, W
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by jltsiren 2y ago
I was thinking more about countries like Finland (85.2%), Sweden (89.2%), Norway (84%), and Denmark (84.5%). Or maybe Switzerland (86.8%) or Netherlands (85.4%).
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by jltsiren 2y ago
That's what export-driven economies have been doing for generations. You can't compete if you are not serious about it.

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