That's a very American mindset. I've worked across both the US and EU at a variety of companies with customers, partners, etc and it's a clear pattern:
- Americans are usually willing to skirt the rules and figure it out later. This comes with risk but is ideal when you're early stage, low stakes, and you couldn't follow the rules anyway.
- Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book and will be shocked if you suggest otherwise. Being process oriented is great for high stakes industries where lives and safety are on the line but destroys startups, likely slowing or even killing innovation.
There is no floor to the level of "petty" that can happen here: the UK - granted, not the EU - goes after individuals who don't pay their TV license and determine the who by triangulating unlicensed TVs via radio trucks and inspectors looking in your windows.
The TV license is silly but the detector van situation is bogus, at least in the present day; really they just blanket mail demand letters to every address in the database on the assumption that everyone watches TV.
> Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book
Again on HN, I don't think conflating Europe and all Europeans into a uniform culture works. This might be true of Germany but as you get further from Berlin it is .. less so.
(Famous story from the Greek debt crisis of using satellite photos to find swimming pools and therefore people who were probably underpaying income tax, which was at such poor compliance levels the state was struggling)
Yes, it appears the "detector vans" are an urban legend/propoganda.
Even more fun, in the lead up to Greece joining the EU, they had to get their government pay under control so they were given monthly caps on what they could pay people. No problem, they created a 13th month.
* As detailed in Michael Lewis' Boomerang: https://amzn.to/4cXJnjE - He's the same guy who wrote The Big Short and Moneyball
Depends on what Europe you mean. Europe can be quite different depending on where you are. I wouldn't say northern Europe wants to do it by the book all the time like the Germans.
Quite common to view Europe as all the same, but Europe varies much more than what US does.
Perhaps one explanation is personal bankruptcy? At least in Scandinavia/Finland this is an unknown concept. You mess up your business (Ireland has EPR fines upto 500ke) and end up paying company loans for the rest of your life.
I don't think any bank will give you such a huge personal loan that you could end up in debt for your whole life, since they typically want the loan repaid. The only way I can imagine that happening is if you're a sole proprietor and you get sued or fined. I can't think of another way to get exposed to that much liability.
100ke might be enough. Once the debt is in enforcement (ulosotto in Finnish), interest can keep accruing at roughly 10%. If your earnings are low, you can pay for years without reducing the principal at all.
What are you doing taking on that kind of risk and starting ventures if your earnings are low? I'm sorry, but if you're a delivery boy living from paycheck to paycheck, you should be trying to get an education, not start a business. That's true in Finland and in the US.
I don't really have this experience. A lot of business I have worked with followed the "let's just do it and figure out the risk later" approach. In highly regulated environment it was different, but then looking for ways to squirt around the rules was the game. See for example the CumCum (don't blame me, it was called like that) tax-evasion scheme put in place by french banks.
Most people are under the impression that those triangulating trucks can't detect anything and they're just an obvious looking enforcement truck used as a scare tactic, is that not the case?
I find this hard to discuss among others as it often results in heated discussions, but in my experience, Europeans have a completely different understanding of what is considered "rude" so much that I struggle to work with a vast majority of them.
That's not to say that there aren't extremely nice people all other Europe... there are. But I'm still caught off guard when hearing them say some things nonchalantly that would get them fired in the US.
Not sure if it's a pattern but when I interviewed with an EU company recently, they explicitly asked if I was married and if I had kids. They explained it as they had a "European mindset towards weekends and holidays" and they expected me to NOT be online.
I was fine with the mindset but never expected to get those questions in an interview, as it'd be illegal in the States.
To be clear: the question isn't illegal. What is illegal is using it to discriminate against a protected class, so as a result, no interviewer with half a brain will ask those questions.
Whenever I call out things like this to European friends they just think I am being an overly-sensitive American. But saying that to a colleague can absolutely get you fired in the US.
The unfortunate truth is that if you break life expectancy out by ethnicity, it tells a different story. Generally Asians, Latinos, and Whites are above while Blacks and Native Americans are below and pull down the average: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9256789/#S12 If you break the groups out and individually compare against countries of similiar ethnicity, the US is often ahead.
For infant mortality specifically, in the US we count every baby with a sign of life, regardless of the age. In many developed countries, they simply don't count too premature (under 22 weeks or 500 grams, iirc) and therefore don't consider them in the metrics. It makes for an apples to oranges comparison.
You're right on "preventable and treatable deaths" with heart disease and diabetes being the biggest contributors. The question for that comes down to "is that a result of systemic issues or individual choices?" because we can do lots about one of those.
Statistical hustling is common, but the most usual form is that the US excludes uninsured individuals to make itself look like it belongs in the developed country cluster.
This means that the average life expectancy of white Americans is actually slightly below the average life expectancy of all Americans.
Incidentally, while a lot of developed countries do not track life expectancy by ethnicity, the UK seems to have a few some studies. (https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...) Though the data is very old (2011-2014), and the data is broken out by sex with no summaries, whites actually fare the worst. Black African females came out at the top, with a life expectancy of 88.9. I asked Google's search what the comparable black American female life expectancy was in 2011, and it gave me 78.2, along with a link. (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6244a8.htm)
Our overall ranking generally is below all "developed countries" that I can see, which range from Germany (~80) to the ~84 of "developed" countries like Japan, Switzerland, and Sweden (along with a few countries still classified as "developing" like Kuwait). It's not completely terrible, but considering how much the United States spends on health care, that's quite a poor value.
There are multiple identified factors for explaining life expectancy, but access to healthcare is identified as a very significant factor. In a system, like America, that is very expensive (likely due to highly inefficient, over-bureaucratic, overly complex, and over-quasi-monopolized systems) and without universal coverage, it follows that those who are poorer may not have the same access to healthcare and may succumb to entirely curable illnesses. So I don't think it's a coincidence that the racial breakdown above almost matches the median ethnic household income (the median white American household earns more than the median Hispanic household, but elsewise it aligns).
On infant mortality, at least one link I found -- https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/infant-... -- which adjusted data due to the reported difference, and still found significantly higher infant mortality in the United States. Though the data is a little old (2016).
Cite the source for "access to healthcare" as a "very significant factor" in US life expectancy? We have pretty good numbers on the mortality cause differences between the US and other countries and they don't align with this claim (unless you're doing some bank-shot argument about how access to health care makes our car crashes more lethal or something).
You'd want to be looking for a scholarly source that puts numbers on this. It's been done! As I noted elsewhere on the thread, the study we're commenting on is based on 1990s numbers about differing mortality of the uninsured. But here you're looking breakdowns of all mortality causes and tying them to insurance, a trickier proposition. Will be interested in whatever you come up with.
I don't know the law in Portugal but I will assume the principles are similar to other western European countries.
If you have book that are actually banned in these countries, I don't think many people will call it awesome.
Books are typically banned for:
- copyright: not really a ban, but the copyright holder simply doesn't want it to be published the way you want it to be, doing it anyway is just piracy. It can be seen as "brave" if the copyright owner is an asshole, but doing that to authors you support is not great.
- hate speech: Germany for instance bans most Nazi stuff, whether or not it is a good thing is debatable, but in any case, what do you think the political message would be if you opened a Nazi library. Most other European countries have similar laws to some degree.
- porn: Need I say more? Special mention to child porn, which is super-banned, and definitely not awesome.
- libel: some people hide behind defamation laws to avoid criticism, but in most cases, these are actual lies and you don't want that.
I don't know of any banned book in Europe that anyone "woke" (for a lack of a better term) would want to put forward.
>The main source for the events of the battle is Herodotus. According to his account, the Spartans held Thermopylae for three days, and although ultimately defeated, they inflicted serious damage on the Persian army. Most importantly, this delayed the Persians' progress to Athens, providing sufficient time for the city's evacuation to the island of Salamis.
>Though a tactical defeat, Thermopylae served as a strategic and moral victory, inspiring the Greek forces to defeat the Persians at the Battle of Salamis later the same year and the Battle of Plataea one year later.
> A quick check here in the States showed all of them available on Amazon for under $25 each.
The term “banned books” has become a pop culture meme. In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere. In extreme cases a government in a controlling country may have forbidden the book.
However in a lot of cases the “banned books” were just not allowed in some school’s library for kids somewhere.
That’s why all of the books aren’t actually banned in the US and are readily available, unless maybe you’re a 3rd grader looking for them at some school library that probably wasn’t going to order the book for kids anyway before it became “banned”
>In this context it doesn’t literally mean banned, it means the book wasn’t allowed somewhere.
and what is a good word to use when something isn't allowed somewhere? perhaps... "banned"?
i dont understand why people think something needs be unavailable globally to be considered "banned".
there's a million examples of the word "banned" being used when X isn't allowed in Y context. people only get touchy about it when it comes to books for some reason.
dang bans people from HN, no one gets upset about the use of the word "ban" there, despite it being a context-specific ban.
The confusion is because some books were literally banned somewhere, while others were just deemed not to be age-appropriate for young children in a school environment.
We don’t call R-rated movies “banned” because we’ve decided not to show it at schools to kids. That’s why it’s confusing when we switch to books and the word “banned” means somebody, somewhere, decided it wasn’t appropriate for kids in their school or something like that.
If someone opened a banned speech museum and then it turns out most of the display is just spam comments from HN it would be pretty silly and rightly criticized.
If you were to make a list of banned books, yes, it would be fine to include Hustler magazine, as it was (and remains) banned in many places (and because of its historical significance in the fight against censorship).
I can pick one up at the corner store or order it online but its not allowed to sit in the libraries of US elementary schools so would you consider it to still be banned in the US?
Pretend confusion, especially over the very terms of the discussion, is a really common shitposting tactic all over the Internet. Though yeah it’s maybe more common here. Possibly because it falls under the category of trolling that doesn’t draw moderator ire (here, I mean, not in general)
its not strange. Books represent knowledge and ideas. Ways of thinking. An attempt to ban a book is an attempt to restrict freedom of thought and the exchange of ideas. It has a historical context and a ban is generally considered on a societal level, not building specific. Some books are not allowed in school buildings, they are not banned.
Banning books for example has a very different context than banning cocaine.
Cocaine use in the United States is banned, Hustler magazine is not. I can swing by the store tomorrow and pick one up legally, I can't get cocaine legally.
Restricting Hustler from a school full of kids is not banning it. Thus the quirk.
If I don't allow Green Eggs and Ham in my house does it belong in a museam of banned books?
I believe when most libraries and stores use the term 'ban', they rely on PEN America's definition:
"any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished." [1]
> "any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
Though this is a fascinating definition.. anytime, anywhere says "no thanks" to carrying a book outside of purely budgetary or physical space limits, it is now a "ban".
The more fascinating question would be discovering the boundary of what PEN, et al consider a "good ban" because I bet we could come up with a few.
> anytime, anywhere says "no thanks" to carrying a book
That's not what the definition you just quoted says. In fact, the definition you quoted is very close to the common definition of "ban": a refusal to allow something, usually by an official entity.
What would happen if a child brought those not-banned or not-censored books to a library/school where they have "forgo those specific books"? What would the reaction be?
I feel like if they'd still let the person read the book by themselves, and freely share it with others, then indeed it's merely a curation choice. But, if I'd expect, they try to prevent this person from reading their own brought book or sharing it with others, then I think it's fair to say that book been banned and/or censored, at least in that particular location.
> “We aren’t including this book because we don’t think it’s appropriate for kids to learn about trans people.” <—- censorship
Removing books from public libraries (not just schools) because we find criticism of certain ideas around gender to be offensive <-- definitely censorship
Of course it worked. Any authoritarian intent on banning a book just could give the spurious reason that "the library does not have enough room" and then there is no censorship ever, according to the original post. See how childish that reasoning is?
I largely agree with you for the time being; I think right now we are in the "dumb authoritarian" phase because Trump, Musk, Thiel can't keep their mouths shut about their true motivations. I fear that there are probably a smarter generation of authoritarians who are more clever (Russel Vought, for example), and not in the spotlight, waiting for their time to ascend.
The loud ones come first, because they have to corrupt the minds of the youth and the mentally weak so they can have a movement.
Banning books on a country level may be silly but curating what is allowed in a school library is not. Which is exactly why people with an agenda want to conflate these two.
The librarians should curate, not the parents. The parents are welcome to decide for their own children what is permissible and not, but should have no authority to prevent others' children from accessing materials they do not find objectionable.
Why is it about "parental rights" when it comes to anti-vaccination, but authoritarian control mechanisms when it comes to someone else's kid reading a fucking book?
If your goal is what to have parents decide what their kids can read then the only way to do that is to have the shared (e.g. school) library carry the commonly agreed upon subset and individual parents who want their kids to have access to more to provide those more controversial book at home. The only reason to call to have books other parents don't want their kids to be exposed to in the school library is if you want to override their choice and make those books available to kids other than yours as well.
No, you need to understand that your specific narrow definition has not handed down by God, and is not more valid than others. US book banning has been a subject for so long now that you are tilling at windmills if you think you can deside what 10000s of people mean when they say banned.
Is a specific institution or library are banned by their decision makers to have a book - that book is banned in that context. If you don't buy this that fair, but don't come at me with your pedantry when I just answered your question.
> Especially if there’s no infrastructure needed to install.
I suspect this is important for two reasons..
First, because yes, it's magnitudes cheaper if you don't have to build and install the infrastructure.
Second, because now you're no longer dependent on your "local provider" which is likely to expect and deal in bribes, share info with local leaders, and generally be a potential risk to everything you want to do.
In the US, the public school system can barely teach basic reading and math. And the teachers don't appear to understand 2nd or 3rd order thinking themselves so therefore are unlikely to be able to teach it.
Teaching systems thinking may be an effective solution but it needs an effective delivery system to test it.
Have you talked to any high school students or teachers lately? The ones I have (via my kids) are all articulate, thoughtful, and kind. It gives me a lot of hope for the future.
I mean, not surprisingly, this is entirely geographic and system dependent. Do your high school teachers (or elementary) have to wear body cameras, practice administering narcan, and how to clear the chamber of a discovered gun, or do they get to 3D print parts for their classroom and go on field trips?
It's the outliers that are geographic and system dependent. Rank the schools and exclude outliers at both extremes. The remaining schools aren't filled with teachers acting like prison guards watching over illiterate students.
Before you offer legal advice, you should at least check the legal definition of "export":
> The EAR definition of “export” extends beyond the transportation of physical goods outside the U.S.
> A “Deemed export” is the release of technology or source code to a foreign national in the U.S. The release is “deemed” to be an export to the last permanent residence status/citizenship of the foreign national. This can occur through demonstration, oral briefing, site visit, or through transmission of non-public data.
I'd love to hear the steelman - what's the argument in favor of using a proprietary electronic system?
There have been legit complaints about closed sourced voting systems for ~20 years and DEFCON has done a "Voting Village" for ~10 years demonstrating numerous issues, some of which were not addressed by the next elections. Transparency doesn't appear better either.
Is it speed to tally? Cost? Easier to screw with results?
It’s cheaper in the short term because these are COTS products. But that’s not a good reason. Voting security should be “zero trust.” We should count votes the same way the Taiwanese, without reliance on technology: https://youtu.be/DUZa7qIGAdo. Voting should be
You must have missed the 2000 election. We hung for weeks on the vagueness of paper ballots. Both sides filed motion after motion to exclude some batch of ballots or other. There was a huge number of extremely unlikely votes in a place with a badly designed paper ballot.
The system right now is a security nightmare, a bad implementation of a bad idea. But anybody who lived through 2000 remembers that as even worse.
Florida was using a punch-card system, thus the infamous hanging chads. Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
> Fill-in-the-bubble scantron systems are much faster and less error prone; not as fast as purely electronic voting, but you get a reliable paper trail that is more transparent and much easier to audit.
An even bigger advantage of scantrol systems is with two simple changes to how ballots are produced and marked you can greatly increase the security and audibility of them.
The two simple changes are:
1. When the ballots are printed you print some alphanumeric codes on them in an invisible ink, and
2. The voter fills in the bubble using a special marker provided at the polling place that turns the invisible code visible.
The scanning machines themselves do not require any modification. Voters vote the same was as before, and can ignore the code that becomes visible in the bubbles they fill in if they way.
By combining the clever chemistry used for the invisible ink and marker with some clever cryptography in how those codes are generated you can overlay and end-to-end auditable voting system on the scantron system. And end-to-end auditable voting system (also called and end-to-end voter verifiable system) has these properties:
• Individuals can verify that their ballot was included in the final count and they vote was attributed correctly.
• Any third party can verify that the ballots were counted correctly. The candidates, the parties, news organization, civil rights groups, and anyone else can check.
• Voters cannot prove to third parties who they voted for. This is called coercion-resistance.
Such a system was developed by several cryptographers, including David Chaum and Ron Rivest. It is called Scantegrity II [1] and has been used successfully in a few elections.
Here are links to a paper by its creators explaining it, in HTML [2] and PDF [3]. Here's a paper [4] showing that it is coercion-resistant.
With this system after the voting is done the election officials can publish all the codes that were revealed. A voter who wants to know if their vote was counted can check that list to see if the code that was revealed to them for that candidate is in the list.
The election officials can also publish some more information that along with the code list allows anybody to verify that the totals for each candidate were right without this revealing the mapping from codes to candidates.
With this we get all the pluses of paper system including hand recounts, plus fast machine counting that can be done with a simple single purpose machine that has no software that could be hacked, yet with the kind of end-to-end auditing that the electronic voting systems promise.
And it inexpensive to implement and operate. Around half of the districts in the US already are using the scantron machines.
As a Floridian, I apologize for the 2000 election. But we have a much better system now. We have paper ballots that are scanned. We have an auditable fallback for untrustworthy machines. There is no reason other states cannot have the same.
Gore probably won that election. I can't help but wonder about an alternate history where he became president and there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.
There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)
The butteryfly ballot was an approved but confusing ballot that almost certainly cost Gore the election. But what is the remedy? There's no other choice but to have a better ballot next time. "The voters were confused by a legal and approved ballot" can't be the basis to overturn an election or it'll never end.
Another good example of this is how Alaska adopted ranked choice voting. In 2022, the 2 Republican candidates got more combined votes than the Democrat who ultimately won [1]. Do you think That was the intent of the voters? Almost certainly not but the electorate just didn't understand RCV and enough people only ranked 1.
In 2024 there was only a single Republican on the ballot so it wasn't an issue [2].
With a margin that small, there's a good chance that Bush won the election because his name came before Gore's. I bet there's more than 500 people in the electorate who simply pick the first name on the list.
What's hilarious to me is that states recognize that ordering of names on the ballot actually makes a difference at the margins, and most states have rules for how to do it: https://ballotpedia.org/Rules_on_ballot_order_and_party_labe.... For example, in 13 states the order of the names on the ballot is decided at random. Given that, it seems foolish to me to pretend that an election with a margin of 500 votes or so produced a discernible winner. I don't know how you fix that in a workable way.
When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).
The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?
But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.
We're not talking about what the Bush campaign wanted. The point is that not even the Gore campaign argued that the double votes should be counted. So they're irrelevant.
They are irrelevant in the sense that there is no legal means to correct them.
They are relevant to the question of who did the voters actually wanted to win, which while not a legally relevant question is interesting. The statistical reports I've seen say that around 2000 of the Buchanan votes were very likely intended as Gore votes.
It’s pretty crazy you want to take a dig at the Bush campaign.
I once did an experiment on my FB where I described Gore’s selective recount scheme but attributed it to Trump. And people jumped up and down talking about how it was voter suppression and cheating. But when I revealed it was Gore, it was just hemming and hawing. These are all smart, college educated people too. Truly, there is no hope for the republic.
I remember the poll that asked Republican voters about their relative approval of “Obamacare” versus “an Affordable Care Act” and got a nearly 20% differential.
And then the number one Google search on the last Election Day? “Did Biden drop out?”
We truly have one of the least informed electorates in the world. And one of the worst for considering political parties as sports teams to be rewarded with loyalty at all costs.
You either misremember or misrepresent WaPo’s reporting.
> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.
> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.
So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.
I was actually thinking of a much later CNN retrospective looking at various studies: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect... (“Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”).
The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”
Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.
CNN says exactly the opposite! “Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”
Counting undervotes isn't my theory. It was Gore's theory of which votes should be counted. Gore never argued overvotes--where a voter had marked multiple candidates--should be counted. The recount studies show that Gore would have lost under the only recount approach the Gore campaign actually pursued.
Of course, the whole thing was completely stupid. They should have stopped with the second machine recount. It was completely insane to entertain the idea that you should try and guess what voters meant when they didn't completely punch a ballot, or punched more than one candidate. The proper thing to do is exclude all ballots where the voter failed to fill out the ballot properly.
"The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all".
So it seems like he won the votes anyways. If your retort is "not if we count undervotes, while ignoring overvotes", that would be a different discussion altogether.
> there was no 9/11 due to smoother handoff between administrations.
It’s an interesting counterfactual but I don’t see the mechanism. The hijackers were mostly in country by inauguration day. While it’s true that they weren’t really operating covertly prior to the attack, I don’t envision a Gore administration that could within months ratchet up FBI/CIA natsec awareness to a level that would change the outcome.
It’s hard for many of us to remember the “before times” now but back then there was a great deal of misplaced faith that foreign attacks on American soil were more or less impossible.
Gore did win that election, but SCOTUS illegally decided it instead of a fair ruling requiring Florida to recount ballots using the same methods in all districts. Americans should have done general strikes and rioting.
I don't know about 9/11, but I doubt Gore's SCOTUS appointees would have made the incorrect decision on Citizens United. America would be in a better place today.
The Supreme Court did require Florida recounts of ballots using the same methods in all districts, and remanded the case to Florida Courts to figure out if there was a legal way to extended the deadline for recounts, to get it done, but they never heard the case, because Gore conceded soon after.
I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.
There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.
There are numerous quotes attributed to the founding fathers regarding how future generations would need to update their solutions for the times. As far as how some will assume, some will assume anything that fits their worldview.
The ones who most venerate the Founding Fathers are the ones who usually claim that the status quo is good. The status quo can always be attributed as the will of the Fathers.
Sometimes that means using a ouija board to assert that some vague passage happens to mean what they want it to mean.
It's bold to assert that people make up Founder Father's reasoning when just above you claim we use the current electronic voting because:
> "I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using."
Instead of just assuming things - aka making things up - you could check.
For the Declaration, Articles, and later the Constitution specifically, much of the Founder Father's reasoning and conclusions were well-documented in public via published letters, essays, and speeches at the time. No ouija board necessary.
Weird egos. I moved from academia to industry and constantly got told "In industry we just care that 'it works'". I thought that was a weird premise, given... you know... who doesn't? But the more time I spent in industry the more time I found that they in fact do not care if it actually works. What seems to matter more is the politics and about "working"[0] the right way using the right new buzzword[1]
Truth is that the work and complexity is not that divorced. Honestly, the work in academia felt harder, though more fulfilling. Industry work hasn't made me have to really think deeply. If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think." Given that (multiple) managers tell me I'm "too slow" just because I'm not producing tons of lines of code (I'm neck and neck with everyone on milestones), I understand what they're talking about. Industry has a working mode of "do first, think second" while academia often thinks first. The reason is really because it is a lot cheaper to think first.
[0] It works enough for some demo to some person
[1] One example is I beat a company's fancy giant transformer based image detector with a scrappy CNN that took only a few hours to train. They were excited for all of 1 day and then wouldn't let me do the same thing to the transformer model (which would have had a bigger impact). Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
> Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
It has always seemed clear to me that the world requires two types of people.
1. "Thinkers", those extraordinarily brilliant people who spend lots of time on a single problem, discovering the optimal and most performance theoretical solution
2. "Hackers", who assemble tools by implementing designs from "Thinkers"
Without Thinkers the Hacker could not possibly solve all required problems well a single tool/product requires
Without Hackers the Thinkers work would languish in the ivory tower it was conceived in
>If anything, I've heard most of my coworkers (at multiple companies) say something along the lines of "we have to move so fast that there's no time to think.
Anecdotally, the tide on this is changing—all the low-hanging fruit has been picked and I see/hear many of my older colleagues regret not having gone the whole way with a PhD. This on top of AI being able to answer many of the engineering questions you might have learned the answers to in a masters/bachelors.
>Fun fact, my boss also loved to tell me about how dumb academia is because they never do anything useful and how industry makes all the real advancements.
He's not entirely wrong though. Industry makes the advancements that actually supposed to sell and be profitable on the free market. Academia is all over the place, as not everything being researched there can be used commercially, often it's just to get grant money, push papers and raise their egos amongst their peers.
That's not the pipeline at all. Academia creates the foundation industry sits on. There's a lot more failure, yes, but hits are way more impactful. Innovations generate entire industries.
So weird argument. Academia isn't meant to be "profitable" because no one is measuring the indirect profits. But when you do it's comically large
>Academia creates the foundation industry sits on.
Depends on the industry. All the researchers I know in academia are just wasting government grant money not delivering anything useful. Their words, not mine.
Why are you conflating and equating "useful" with "sells for profit on the free market"?
There are many areas of research where profit is not a goal, and cannot be one. Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit. Researching different education methods, same. Hell, the researchers who won the 2024 Nobel prize in economics, who helped us understand how to build economically successful nations, something incredibly useful, cannot turn a profit with their research.
It's frankly absurd to expect everything useful to be profitable.
I really don't get why it's so commonly stated. It's so obviously dumb once you think about it for more than 5 seconds. It's like people arguing that improving the track or improving the shoes doesn't win races because at the end of the day it's the runner that crosses the finish line. Sure, but to discredit everything but the runner is so myopic. Let them run barefoot and run on glass shards, then watch them lose
> Understanding how and why climate changes is extremely important and useful, but cannot turn a profit.
That definitely is for profit. They aren't researching climate change for the love of the game, but because agriculture, oil futures, real estate development, insurance policies, all depend on predicting climate developments.
I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.
To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic
Drug development is just a totally different game. The tools are the same but the difference between what the reviewers at your favorite high impact publication want and what the FDA wants are pretty different. People spend their whole careers getting good at the latter in the same way people get good at the former.
I've seen people come from academia and thrive and I've also seen the struggle. Some people also go to school with the goal of doing drug development, which sometimes academic folks don't realize.
- person who was good at microscope and ended up in early stage drug development ~10y
Biotech and academia have very different standards for data quality and reproducibility. Most of the biotech people I know view academic research as an interesting first draft at best.
If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.
That may depend on the field. My experience (in bioinformatics method development) is that people in the industry can't afford to work on state-of-the-art problems. But once a problem has become established and it's important enough to be worth their time, they will eventually come up with a better solution due to their superior resources.
Because the results from an acedemic paper are not, ever, going to be injected into a customer's arm. Developing products for sale in the real world is very different than designing lab experiments.
Sure, but it would seem the solution would be to hire the recently minted PhDs and teach them through more senior staff how to operate in the real world, just like in literally any other profession.
Instead you’ll just whine until they let you import a billion more Indians
I have the 2017 edition of the Lego Millenium Falcon and ~7500 pieces took about 30 hours without being super organized or focused. At that rate, this is almost 50 hours of assembly but I'd wager there's a ton of duplication in this one, likely speeding things up.
And yes, for these sorts of sets, you put them on display. I added LEDs to mine:
Ha! This set it designed to take 114 years to construct and for maximum verisimilitude, Lego will run over your foot with a Lego tram after only a few decades of trying to build it.
I'd love to see the back of that if you actually integrated the LEDs into the main engine (and I apologize if you did post other photos, I have X mostly blocked so I can only see the directly linked post.) I've been hacking at adding some lights to a few sets that I thought would look great with actual lighting on them, and my biggest challenge has been the routing of all the wires in a way where the lights actually look like they're integrated into the set and not just randomly sticking out of places.
I don't think I have pictures of the back specifically but the route was:
Started on one side of the engine framing, all the way across, inside through the body then around the round section holding the bottom gun turret, then along the front bottom edge, back into the body and around the top round section of the gun turret, back into the body into the bridge and across the ceiling ending there.
The LED string itself had adhesive backing, so I'd put it in place, remove a section of the adhesive cover, attach it, then do another section. It was probably 3-6" at a time, so not fast or easy. I had to take off a bunch of the ship panels - super easy - to get at some of the portions. My goal was that you couldn't see the LEDs directly from most viewing angles and was mostly successful
The LED string was ~$60 and it was a silly amount of work but I have it sitting over my left shoulder during conference calls and people ask about it constantly so it was fun.
Ah I see. What I've been trying to do is integrate the LEDs into specific pieces instead, so I've mostly been using individual ones rather than strips. I was actually inspired by a Lumibricks set for my method of routing the pieces. Currently I'm trying to add lights to the modular Cinema set, which I think would be great, and I've had to resort to cutting out parts of bricks to get things routed around.
> The LED string was ~$60 and it was a silly amount of work but I have it sitting over my left shoulder during conference calls and people ask about it constantly so it was fun.
My first experiment with adding lights was to the Technic Porsche set, and interestingly, in meetings it doesn't get blurred as much as the rest of the background (probably due to the lights I put in it) so I often get asked about it as well.
That adds up. I have the Tower Bridge, Grand Piano, and Lighthouse that were similar. Tower Bridge was 4200 and 20 hours, Grand Piano, 3600 and 15, Lighthouse about 3000 and 12.
- Americans are usually willing to skirt the rules and figure it out later. This comes with risk but is ideal when you're early stage, low stakes, and you couldn't follow the rules anyway.
- Europeans absolutely want to do it by the book and will be shocked if you suggest otherwise. Being process oriented is great for high stakes industries where lives and safety are on the line but destroys startups, likely slowing or even killing innovation.
There is no floor to the level of "petty" that can happen here: the UK - granted, not the EU - goes after individuals who don't pay their TV license and determine the who by triangulating unlicensed TVs via radio trucks and inspectors looking in your windows.
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