jltsiren

32 ms·

781.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Nobody is expected to take the 5% goal seriously. Even the US has not reached that level since 1992, with the current defense spending at 3.4%. If the US decided to leave NATO completely, European military spending might stabilize somewhere
782.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Everyone with the power and legitimacy to act is already involved in whatever the administration is doing. Apart from a violent coup or a revolution (which could easily lead to a civil war), nothing can really stop this before the next elec
783.
by jltsiren 2y ago
There are no good solutions for existing neighborhoods with street parking. In new or completely redeveloped neighborhoods, you can make the streets narrower, the lots larger, and the property owners responsible for parking. But street park
784.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I don't think that's fundamentally different from the US model. While some countries have general funding calls where individual PIs can request funding for basically anything, the US model is based on large decentralized projects
785.
by jltsiren 2y ago
For most, it's a simple defense mechanism. Some topics are more likely to attract assholes than others. If you don't want to be drawn into a political debate with assholes, you don't study those topics. Better to study someth
786.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I've never really understood why undergrounding the grid is so insanely expensive in California. In Finland, installing a 20 kV underground cable costs something like €50/m + VAT, which is $100k/mile.
787.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Economic efficiency comes from accurate pricing. If grid power is artificially expensive in urban areas, people will install solar panels and batteries in situations where it doesn't really make sense. And if grid power is artificially
788.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Cross subsidies like that promote inefficiency. They are one of the main reasons why living in California is so expensive. Utilities should be legally required to serve everyone in their area, but they should also be allowed to charge the r
789.
by jltsiren 2y ago
It's death by a million regulations. In some countries, a researcher can write a grant on their own, with minimal support from the university. Not in the US. If you are not a full-time administrator, it's effectively impossible to
790.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I haven't seen any luxurious campuses in the US, though I don't have much experience with student housing and services. Some departments are baseline modern office buildings, while others remind me more of Latin America than Europ
791.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I believe the median endowment of an R1 university is around $1 billion. That corresponds to $30 million to $40 million of sustained income a year. Enough to fund a single reasonably large academic department, or about as much as grant over
792.
by jltsiren 2y ago
That's a naive understanding of grant overheads. Only a portion of the overhead is used for facilities and services directly used by the PI and their lab. The rest are better understood as federal subsidies to research universities. Th
793.
by jltsiren 2y ago
A lot of the inefficiency comes from being an educational institution. Mentoring grad students is inefficient. Giving research opportunities to undergrads is even more inefficient. Universities would be far more efficient if they would only
794.
by jltsiren 2y ago
More like a major disruption than a complete disaster. If the funding cuts actually happen, I expect that states would create their own funding agencies. At least the ones that care about academic research. After a while, the impact would b
795.
by jltsiren 2y ago
That sounds like a misunderstanding. Federal grants usually have excessively strict restrictions on what you can do with the money. To the extent that labs can't pay many reasonable expenses if they don't have other sources of fun
796.
by jltsiren 2y ago
3) Use your first-hand experience as an anchor. Propaganda is often easy to see through in concrete situations. Even as a kid, it was easy to tell the difference between the quality of life in the USSR and Western Europe. 4) If you don&#x27
797.
by jltsiren 2y ago
The broken part is the idea that the legislative and judicial branches can act as checks and balances for the executive branch. In the end, the executive branch is the only branch with the ability to do something. The other two are just a b
798.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Paying too much can be counterproductive, if the job is demanding, people don't find it inherently rewarding, and most people are not qualified for it. If you earn enough to retire after 10 years, you also earn enough to feel financial
799.
by jltsiren 2y ago
More like Americans repeatedly vote for change, because the change they got four years earlier was too bad. It reminds me of Chile, which keeps oscillating between socialist and conservative presidents every four years.
800.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Vulnerable, not obsolete. Unless the war is in North America, you need cargo ships to get the heavy equipment and fuel there. And then you need a navy to protect the cargo ships from those cheap naval drones and other threats.
801.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Isn't the entire point that people should order their packages from companies subject to US jurisdiction? Or at least from countries that make a good faith effort to enforce compliance with US regulations. On the other hand, that point
802.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Things that look magical often stop being magical when you have the right perspective and the right abstractions. The step from a toy example to proving any verifiable statement is just NP-completeness. Which is simple enough that undergrad
803.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Public-key cryptography is magic. Zero-knowledge proofs are a consequence that's difficult to find on your own but easy to understand once you've seen it. I remember seeing someone (probably Avi Wigderson) demonstrating a zero-kno
804.
by jltsiren 2y ago
One way to look at data compression is splitting it into a model and an encoder. The model describes the data, while the encoder encodes (or equivalently predicts) the data according to the model. The compressed output consists of the seria
805.
by jltsiren 2y ago
The way I see it, the dysfunctionality of the Congress and the rule by executive orders have made the President closer to an elected king than the chief executive of a republic. The US is now closer to a monarchy than the actual monarchies
806.
by jltsiren 2y ago
I think a better approach would be to rewrite the Constitution, taking into account what has been learned over the centuries. The executive branch should become more like a bureaucracy and less like a monarchy. In particular, department hea
807.
by jltsiren 2y ago
It's all about stability and predictability. Science, like other forms of business, favors an environment without sudden regulatory changes. Sudden changes make the government an unreliable partner incapable of committing to anything b
808.
by jltsiren 2y ago
There is a simpler explanation: every Waymo vehicle is effectively the same. If one makes a mistake, every vehicle will likely keep making the same mistake over and over again, until it's fixed. If the mistake causes harm, there is oft
809.
by jltsiren 2y ago
There is a difference between established people in the region use and deliberate name changes. Seas usually have multiple names, because people give names from their own point of view. "East Sea" often refers to the Baltic Sea. E
810.
by jltsiren 2y ago
Games are designed to take advantage of the hardware capabilities commonly available in gaming PCs and consoles. If CPU/GPU performance or RAM/storage capacity increases, it's always possible to make a game a little bit bette

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