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Comment Re:Crrot and Stick (Score 2) 94

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

Comment Re:Conservatives cause this (Score 1) 94

When you say "STEM vs pretend degrees", you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There is a near continuum of "hardness" of subject, and even that's not well defined, and the quesiton of whether EE is harder than pure math doesn't have a clear answer, but which way you answer definitely affects what the opposite is.

E.g., "German" is not a STEM major, but it's also not a pretend degree. OTOH, Philosophy is often a fluff major, but some of them attempt to be as rigorous as any experimental physicist. (Most don't succeed, because it's a really difficult thing to do.)

Comment Re:Conservatives cause this (Score 1) 94

Outlawing home schooling is too dangerous. Also MOST homeschooling is destructive, but some is the exact opposite.

I'll agree that home schooling is destructive to society, even when making accommodation to geniuses and other "special needs" students, but it's destructiveness isn't even the same order of magnitude as that of "social media". (I'll agree that social media needn't be destructive, but just about all of it is.)

Comment Re:China has to subsidize. (Score 1) 127

That's not going to apply to factories that are built for full automation. And it's reported that that's the way the Chinese build auto manufacturing plants.

Full automation is probably an overstatement, but nearly full automation will still mean that health insurance isn't a major part of the expense.

Comment Re:TL;DR: Gotta keep the bubble going (Score 2) 125

And anyway, Presidents cant make laws.

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

Comment Focus. (Score 5, Interesting) 94

China wanted to lead on science, and made the effort. Now that's paying off, and relatively fast as well it seems. China sent out promising students to foreign universities, to return with valuable learning. They court scientists to move to China, and fund a lot of research. And they have a decent school system with highly motivated students. They have plans and policies in place that work.

What does the West have? Science is beginning to have a bad name here. They tell you you're a sucker if you take a STEM major in college, except perhaps if you study to be a doctor or a dentist, or "something something AI". You're even dumber if you actually pursue a career in academia. Meanwhile we have New Math (a US thing, I know, but here in Europe schooling in mathematics is just as dire), or whatever new nonsense they cooked up. In my country, they are again lowering the nr. of hours per week spent on STEM subjects in high school. More focus on humanities and civics... as they say: "teaching children to be good citizens". Dumb AF, but... good citizens, sure. Taught to challenge everything, and not given the tools or knowledge to do so effectively. One in three kids aged 15 here is functionally analphabetic. Because even reading comprehension and accurate spelling are now optional. Chinese kids work and study hard, ours are taught that being on time is a "white construct", and that STEM education needs to be "decolonized".

No, we're not going to catch up with China. Unless we change our focus.

Comment Re:TL;DR: Gotta keep the bubble going (Score 1) 125

"The Trump administration, with the aid of AI and crypto czar David Sacks, has been pursuing a path that would allow federal rules to preempt state regulations on AI

Uh, ever heard of the Supremacy Clause? This is really a nothing burger, it simply re-asserts that the supremacy clause applies to Crypto

Comment Wow, shocking! (Score -1, Troll) 30

The researchers say that while the study cannot establish causation, the patterns suggest that supporting low-income students during their transition from college to the labor market may be a fruitful area for policy intervention.

They figured out giving poor college students money when they graduate may be "fruitful"?

Did anyone consider the majors/degrees the poor students and the other (non-poor?) students graduated with? Of course not, why would that matter? The point of this study was to affirm the obvious - people that need money to afford college could probably benefit from continuing to get money after college.

It is very hard for me to imagine a scenario where it would be harmful to give anyone any money at any time for any purpose, maybe we could stop funding these types of studies to keep discovering this obvious truth?

Comment Re: How is RISC-V better than ARM? (Score 1) 17

I had read that MIPS has pretty much abandoned its ISA in favor of RISC-V. Not a major deal, since only 2 instructions were different. Also, in addition to OpenSparc and OpenPower, ARM itself is "open" in the sense that it can be licensed, after a company pays an upfront membership fee (According to Steve Furber, it was to keep ARM from going into the red).. I daresay one could even do what Cyrix and Centaur, in addition to AMD, used to do in the 90s w/o running afoul of either Intel or AMD ISA patents

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