[1] is the first paper Google spewed out, though I think there is newer work. I'm on mobile though, so can't check. The basic idea is to figured out how many stars that may support space faring civilizations have formed, and how many will form in the future. Add in some delay for planets and life to form, and account for the death of the star, and you can estimate how many such species should spawn over time, and thus tell if we are early or late to the party (assuming all assumptions are somewhat right)
This has nothing do with people’s civic engagement levels, and everything to do with money. The semiconductor industry gets a massive subsidy because they spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying - impoverished schoolchildren get left to starve because they don’t.
Think you can have an effect by contacting your elected officials? Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed. Not to mention all the gerrymandering...
Your first two sources are just comparing spending to returns. It doesn't address the hard question which is about causality.
A better explanation for The American Jobs Creation Act is probably the fact that republicans support lower taxes, and they won in 2016.
Regarding the Microsoft case with the IRS, perhaps the fact that everyone hates the IRS is a better explanation?
>Public preference has almost no impact on what legislation gets passed.
Why would it have a significant impact? We don't pass laws by poll.
>Not to mention all the gerrymandering
This one seems real from what I've seen, but I need to look into it more, and I don't think it should be tied very closely to money in politics.
I doubt it. The parallels of this rhetoric from the war on terror is stark. You can put anything under the umbrella of national security, and your average senator is perfectly aware of that. A theoretical threat to semiconductor distribution pails in comparison to the actual threat of climate change or the real threat of poverty which millions of Americans are facing.
No, I don’t believe the senators looked at this with an unbiased mind and came to this conclusion on their own volition. Much rather, they rely on some funding for their campaigning, and said funding had a deep influence on their decision. Not rational thinking.
Securing core resources has been a long standing national security concern for countries. Also, there’s a good chunk of populist isolationist sentiment in the zeitgeist.
Senators aren’t unbiased. They’re biased towards what their voters want. If they step out of line, they’ll likely get crushed.
I don’t think money in politics is very explanatory. It seems a basic understanding of the 3 branches and the interplay between the states and federal government explains a lot.
I think you might be underestimating voter apathy. Voter apathy stems further then low voter turnout, it also includes people who vote despite not caring or despite not believing their values will not be represented in that vote. That is, the lesser of two evils is a very real thing for many (most?) voters.
For that to be true there would have to be some dissonance between what voters actually want and to what their representatives actually deliver. If you don’t believe this dissonance exist, then sure, there is nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. I on the other hand, not only believe such dissonance exist, but is a fundamental flaw in our democracy.
I mean… yes? I thought this was common knowledge; there’s certainly no shortage of documentation available: the ROI from lobbying efforts is insanely high, on the order of 75,000% by many estimates.
I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.
(Not so clear, personally, how you justify transposing this semiconductor handout to the more superficially defensible “national security”; but see also fossil fuel subsidies, corporate tax breaks, barring negotiated drug pricing: https://visual.ly/community/Infographics/politics/amazing-ro... )
As for “why is it so cheap”? I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.
It’s very low effort for a corporation to threaten to offshore and ask for a handout to not follow through on the threat. And it’s a very easy call for the politician to take the bribe, because then they can go back their constituency and say “We saved your jobs from going to China!” Everybody wins except the taxpayers. (And the corporations will go ahead and offshore, or not, just like they would have anyway, because one of the services they pay their lobbyists for is ensuring there will be no consequences for accepting the handout.)
>I find it amusing that you dismissed this in a sibling comment as “just comparing spending to returns”… that’s literally what lobbying is: spending money to secure political favor. If our elected representatives simply agree that something should be a priority, companies wouldn’t need to bribe them to do it.
This is wrong. That's not what lobbying is understood to be. I think you're confusing lobbying with campaign contributions or PAC money. Lobbying is basically just advocating.
>I always assumed it was at least in part because there are a limited number of politicians competing with each other for the same funding sources.
That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?
That's fair. I was imprecise: I should have made it explicit that I was speaking about lobbying in America:
> The one big difference between the US and the EU is that the majority of policymakers in the EU institutions are not elected, and since they do not need to stand for elections, they do not need to find the significant amounts of cash to support campaigns. Instead of spending innumerable hours fundraising, they balance competing interests in an effort to produce policies that are seen as legitimate, though produced by a less-than-democratic supranational structure. https://www.politico.eu/article/why-lobbying-in-america-is-d...
US Lobbyists funneled a total of 3.77 billion dollars into campaign coffers in 2021, and are already over 2 billion for 2022. I hope it's not necessary to point out that they're not doing that without the expectation of a return on that investment (and as we've already seen, they absolutely are getting that ROI.)
> That's kind of dodging the question. Why are there so few funding sources then?
Not sure I see how it's dodging the question, especially since my following paragraph continues not dodging it in greater detail.... but setting that aside, the obvious answer to "why are there so few funding sources" is "there is a finite number of wealthy individuals and organizations", with a side order of "and they tend to consolidate their lobbying activities into industry groups". (To be specific, in 2022 that finite number is 11,441.)
In an economic system where the rich earn money just from being rich, you have a strong incentive as a politician to sell your country as ten million dollars will result in a perpetual and exponentially growing income stream that exceeds a politicians salary multiple times and you don't even have to lift a finger, just do a single corruption stint and be locked in the upper class with the rest of the wealthy for the rest of your life.
Your CEO brain calipers don’t need to be worth a shit in order for you to make money with them. If the market moves predictably every time you publicly announce your findings, that’s all you need.
> Your advice is to be selfish and not care what anybody thinks about you?
Well if one wants to be cynical that's how big fortunes and generally big advantages to self happen.
That is behaving selfishly and somehow manage to avoid repercussions.
Just two examples from stuff that is in the news these days:
1) The grift happened during the War on terror (especially 2001-2010) which somehow was never investigated
2) Members of the rock band "The Rolling Stones" . They cumulatively slept with thousands of married women and women in relationships. They all somehow managed to avoid the husbands and boyfriends looking for their wives. Most of them had homicidal intent against Mick Jagger and their unfaithful wife.
No, on the contrary. It's not very clear from my post, but I warn people not to expect any gratitude when they selflessly give their cookies away.
And if you do share your cookies (which is a good thing!), be careful who you share it with.
That's all.
Having been in the position of selflessly giving my cookies away with no expectation of reward - the reward was amazing, and worth way more than the cookies.
Besides, the so called 'leaders' in this experiment were pretty selfish. Making all kinds of gross noises while eating their cookie. Did they care what somebody else thought of them?
> Besides, the so called 'leaders' in this experiment were pretty selfish. Making all kinds of gross noises while eating their cookie. Did they care what somebody else thought of them?
That bit made me suspect the study - that the "leader" ate the cookie is believable, that they did so in a semi-vindictive manner is not believable.
Why are we so surprised that animals understand the concept of zero? Being hungry, searching for food, and finding nothing seems like as universal and visceral experience of zero as anything I can imagine. I don’t think it’s possible to evaluate food sources without some idea of what zero means.
Because programming languages are a public good, and public goods are fundamentally incompatible with a profit motive. A “programming language startup” would be like an “anti-poverty startup” or “social justice startup” - either an edifice doomed to fail because of its inherent contradictions, or a front for lies and grifting.
Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right?
I'm not sure why they would have sold if they ever figured out how to make a software part of the clojure ecosystem sustainable & growable revenue source, e.g., hosting.
In contrast, Julia's recent fundraise is on a successful science tool that happens to be written in Julie, and a hope that hosted Julie might one day pay the bills. But not proven yet. NPM & dockerhub showed repo hosting is tough to succeed on even with wide use, though Anaconda shows promise when mixed with consulting revenue.
Jean's article also toes around developers not always being the buyer, so requiring a model more like Twilio, where they are presales/marketing for some other customer. That kind of misalignment adds another level of pain.
> Cognitect was a successful consulting services startup that didn't build a scalable software product/service, right?
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by that, Cognitect is a relatively small company (if I'm not mistaken, there are fewer than 20 engineers work there). And there are plenty of products built on Clojure ecosystem. It scales very well. Cisco, Apple, Walmart, etc., are all successfully built and keep expanding their [massive] Clojure code-bases.
Didn't Cognitect primarily make money through consulting services revenue for other people's projects, and not selling Clojure / Clojure tools?
I think there was a product attempt by becoming a database company -- datomic -- that happened to be written in clojure, but ultimately they still got bought out for consulting vs product: https://www.cognitect.com/blog/2020/07/23/Cognitect-Joins-Nu...
So again, for all the good parts, just not the success story for a PL/tools startup that Jean is looking for..
That's clearly not true because such companies existed in the past and were not "doomed to fail" nor fronts for lies and grifting. The most obvious example was Borland which dominated the 90s with their superior commercial compilers and programming languages, at least for anyone writing Windows apps which back then most people were.
100% agree - let’s not forget that at the start of the pandemic the social media platforms called the lab leak theory an extreme conspiracy and some social platforms blocked links, now it’s one of the leading theories, so clearly and unsurprisingly these policies have already resulted in legitimate discourse being blocked.
I think I use the scientific method a lot, and dismissing a possible theory as "extremist conspiracy" before having all the answers is very unscientific, especially if the other theory (zoonotic spread) doesn't have bulletproof evidence yet. The fact that some scientists signed up to the zoonotic theory and dismissed the lab leak theory is weird, and the fact that social media banned the links means their censorship is flawed.
Then again, too many idiots think proof means "The CCP notoriously likes to hide stuff, therefore they're hiding the lab leak, therefore the lab leak theory is real, QED". That sort of disinformation does deserve a ban.
Now watch this comment get downvoted for... not following the herd?
> Then again, too many idiots think proof means "The CCP notoriously likes to hide stuff, therefore they're hiding the lab leak, therefore the lab leak theory is real, QED". That sort of disinformation does deserve a ban.
"The CCP notoriously likes to hide stuff, which makes it more likely that they're hiding the lab leak, which makes it more likely that the lab leak theory is true" isn't that far off but seems much more reasonable.
Should we ban people for making strawman arguments, or should we steelman their argument in response?
> which makes it more likely that they're hiding the lab leak, which makes it more likely that the lab leak theory is true.
Geezus Christ, just as I'm talking about scientific thinking and lack of it. No and no! It's possible, but they're not more likely!
Why they don't want Western investigators free reign investigating the lab? Imagine if the WHO asked the US to let in Chinese investigators in their virology labs. Maybe they're hiding bio-weapons research, or cancer research that they want bragging rights for, but it doesn't automatically mean there's the "Covid smoking gun" being hidden there. It's possible, but them being cagey doesn't make it more possible.
It sounds like you've misunderstood the statement.
They're not saying the lab-leak is more likely than not given the CCP likes to hide things. They're saying the lab-leak becomes relatively more likely after conditioning on the information that the CCP likes to hide things.
That's completely reasonable if we think the tendency to hide info is going to asymmetrically impact the investigation into a leak more than an investigation into zoonotic origins. It's also reasonable even if we think they're going to hide things whether or not it really was a leak, since the impact can still be asymmetric.
If someone has a track record of hiding stuff, that fact makes it more likely [0] they are actually hiding something. It doesn’t definitively prove they are hiding anything in particular; something being more likely is compatible with it being false. And saying “more likely” is saying nothing about how much more likely; it could just be slightly more likely.
I don’t see how saying that is a “lack of scientific thinking”. I think that criticism is just false.
[0] “more likely” is talking about epistemic probability, Bayesian probability
> If someone has a track record of hiding stuff, that fact makes it more likely [0] they are actually hiding something.
That's a tautology. So what, what if someone came with a theory that the virus comes from meteorite that people from this lab had been researching? Does their cageyness mean more likely that the meteorite theory is true? Geez...
> So what, what if someone came with a theory that the virus comes from meteorite that people from this lab had been researching?
The two scenarios are not the same, and denying a plausible scenario isn’t the same as denying an unplausible scenario, particularly when there are negative incentives.
Is your argument really comparing the theory that a coronavirus that hopped species might have come from the lab next door which was doing research on how coronaviruses hopped species with it coming in on a meteorite?
A better example would be if a giant smouldering crater suddenly appeared, and the Chinese government started saying it wasn’t a meteor and holes sometimes just appear because of tectonic activity, while at the same time blocking other nations scientists from seeing the crater.
You're attempting a reductio ad absurdum but it's not valid because the meteorite has a tiny prior probability of being true, whereas the lab leak doesn't have such a tiny prior due to historical precedent of it happening a number of times, even if it is much less likely to be true as the zoonotic origin explanation in the case of COVID.
Thank you. I think this discussion makes more sense if one has a basic understanding of Bayesianism – one starts with a prior probability, one then has various pieces of evidence and associated conditional probabilities than one uses to update that probability, and then one arrives at a posterior probability after updating based on those pieces of evidence. I was talking about the conditional probability for one particular piece of evidence; I was never saying anything about the prior or posterior probability. Obviously you, and others, get this, but it seems
bellyfullofbac doesn't.
I think the consensus is yet to move on this one. In a recent text I saw by someone who was trying to channel the majority opinion of the scientific community, they were calling it the less likely possibility, or something to that effect. I believe it's only in the public opinion that it became one of the leading theories, because the media suddenly decided that it was going to allow people to talk about it, and Jon Stewart went on Stephen Colbert...
That's just one out of many more events the mainstream media has been disregarding or lying about. It may be extreme to call the mainstream media propaganda but then again, it may not.
When people say mainstream media what do they mean? Our Swiss media houses never really excluded any Theorie that could get milked for clicks. I mean why would they?
Facebook did censor a lot, but Facebook can't be considered media.
Edit:// isn't it more the lack of willingness to explore outside your bubble before you form an opinion?
> let’s not forget that at the start of the pandemic the social media platforms called the lab leak theory an extreme conspiracy and some social platforms blocked links
That was because back then the people spreading the lab leak theory were almost exclusively Alex Jones-level or worse crackpots.
But the aggressiveness with which this theory was dismissed and ridiculed is unbelievable. In the beginning i had often to double-check that I got the context right - that in fact it's about an accidental leak, not intended, but still treated like some tinfoil hat preaching, a conspiracy theory. If anything, that kind of response could push me to believing conspiracies i otherwise wouldn't.
I lost a lot of respect for the general population and even the crowd here.
I think the issue with the early messaging on the lab-leak theory is that it was bundled with anti-immigrant messaging, which was somehow presented as an alternative to actually doing anything at all about controlling the spread of the virus.
Which is to say, it appeared to me that the messaging was along the lines of
* There's a virus, but it's no big deal and it's going to disappear, and you're an idiot if you wear a mask
* However, the virus was started in a lab in China
* Therefore, we should put more resources toward border security and remove avenues to citizenship and work visas
* And people who appear to be of asian descent should be harassed on the street for good measure
If someone gives you a message that's 75% bullshit, it can be difficult to sort out the other 25%.
Some people certainly spread such messages, but on HN and other places in early 2020, I saw many reasonable, scientific-minded, likely left-leaning people discuss the possibility soberly.
My own stance shifted a bit due to an early/mid-2020 HN thread, where I kind of naively assumed there was already a conclusive consensus around a zoonotic origin and that the sequence didn't indicate any human meddling. I presented that side of it, and also how the presence of the lab has to be considered in a Bayesian sense; e.g. what if the lab was built there due to an existing concentration of new viruses or virus-carrying species in that area. After reading some thoughtful replies, I realized it was pretty irresponsible and not completely rational of me to dismiss the theory out of hand, and ended up editing my post and have been continuously considering and weighing all of the circumstantial evidence on either side since then. (At the moment I'm pretty much agnostic or 50/50 on it.)
In some cases deliberately, but usually inadvertently and due to bias, those positions will be painted with the brush of the craziest, least credible, and most assholish of the sources. I'm an armchair conspiracy theory (attempted) debunker so I've seen this and have tried to keep myself from doing this many times, because it's actually a failure mode that's not as severe as but not quite unlike the pervasive confirmation bias of conspiracy theorists themselves. This kind of pattern matching often does work well, which is what makes it even more epistemologically fraught when applied to new, controversial events and ideas that are developing in real-time.
Pretty sure Alex Jones has stated in court, in his own defense that everything he says is for "entertainment" has has no basis in truth or reality. So by his own admission, you can't trust what he says. You can be entertained though and apparently that's enough for many Americans.
I don't watch Rachel Maddow but I certainly wouldn't trust her opinion (being a TV news personality) on such important topics as COVID where she (and every other news personality) has zero qualifications.
Her defense in a defamation lawsuit was that she was using hyperbole in offering an opinion. She's not the only commentary show host to use that defense, but she's the most notable one on the left that a lot of people like to overlook when pointing out the exaggerations and hyperbole on the right.
She was also the first to use the defense, i.e. before Tucker Carlson used it. I mention this because it's a fact that people often overlook when discrediting extremist comments from Carlson like "the NSA read my emails."
I’d like to see some sources for this, because this sounds like unscientific, unprovable drivel.