Graft, at least in the US parlance, is when a government official provides government funding to enhance the viability of a private enterprise, while simultaneously investing in that enterprise themselves, and making a killing on the return from that investment, through leveraging the stability and exclusivity of the government's financial contributions to the success of that enterprise.

Why it is bad:

Investing in companies in this manner creates necessary exclusivities which gives unfair market advantages to the recipient of the graft's financial capital. It also creates a quid pro quo relationship between the government official that created the deal, and the enterprise that accepted it, which can be exploited in any number of truly devious and heinous ways.

Now--

If the government wants to support struggling American chip foundries, they can universally invest across the board, while simultaneously imposing a hard rule against *ANY AND ALL* public servants privately investing at the same time.

This, at least in theory, removes the majority of the reasons why the dealmaking is *BAD*. (not all, just most).

Since our legislators balk at the idea of ANY AND ALL forms of *restriction* to their investment activities while in office, and since Pres Trump seems *incapable* of understanding that Quid Pro Quo is *BAD*, I have to come out very much against the government *INVESTING* in companies in this manner.

There's also data showing that Millennials and zoomers are not getting more republican as they get older.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fco...

However, there *IS* evidence that an unsettling number of zoomers are straight up redpilled.

Picking winners in a such a shockingly open way is the pinnacle of open governance!

Using the office of the presidency to support a company, while heavily investing in them, so that it succeeds and you make lots of money is certainly not illegal!

No, not at all! Certainly not GRAFT, No, THAT'S A CRIME!"

This is PROTECTING AMERICAN INTERESTS, Yeah-- that's it!

Surely!

If you mean the toxic hazard potential caused by PFAS, and other such compounds, then yes.

A basic rule of thumb, is that if a thing-- any thing at all, of any kind or nature-- is "USEFUL" or "PROFITABLE", but also has "But it will cause some horrible bad thing to happen if used", it will be used, and used heavily, 100% of the time, until its use is forcibly stopped. (and even then, it will be whined about, A LOT.)

Examples include such noteworthy entries as tetra-ethyl lead, C8/GenX, CFCs in aerosol sprays, plasticizers in polymer products, glyphosate and other herbicides, an abundance of insecticides, antibiotics in food animals, and if you want to get away from chemicals, you have things like, sub-prime lending packages, cryptocurrencies, gerrymandering, etc.

It is simply how humans behave when presented with these conditions. All of them are variations on the tragedy of the commons, and it is a very well known problem with human behavior.

Further causing frustration, is that a fair number of people ardently refuse to accept that it is even a problem *at all*, and that it should be seen as a valuable, predictable, and reliable feature to tap into for wealth generation.

In many cases, the reason you cant do that, is because of the requirements of the seminal study in the first place.

Things like lifetime cohort studies, for instance, (where are you going to get another 5000 people to track for a lifetime study of a once in a lifetime event? A time machine?) or where very specialized equipment that costs a small fortune to produce (like the stuff at CERN) are at play.

Think about what you are actually saying, and then think more critically about the replication crisis, and then think about the current state of academia more like an experiment that is not performing according to expectations. (specifically, the expectation is that impact factor and impact scoring are sufficient controls to combat and control fraudulent papers proliferating and poisoning the credibility of the entire endeavor.)

Current processes are geared to explicitly maximize new work, even though the actual quality of that work cannot be verified, and is increasingly having problems with actual quality. (with perverse incentives on the rise to actually do the opposite: actively degrade quality. See for instance, the hackjob work done by private interests to undermine "undesired" findings, such as about our climate, and human impact thereon.)

Again, this is because of a fundamental failure to appreciate the value of boring replication work, which is exactly what I suggested.

Boring replication work combats both kinds of problem, but we do not give it the valuation it deserves.

The reason current polices are geared to maximize new work, is due to the resource scarcity with which to do meaningful work in the first place (it's very hard to get the funding to follow 5000 people for 50 years to see how the removal of tetraethyl lead from fuel has changed human behavior, for instance), which is another way of saying that there just isn't enough funding to study the things that need to be studied, let alone verify the findings of the things we can fund to study.

The people holding the purse strings are still politicians, since they set the size of the award pool to start with.

So far, your arguments have been "Refusal to see the forest, for the trees" and "Insisting nothing is wrong, even with alarming evidence to the contrary in your face."

Am I saying that your course of action is incorrect, given your position? No. You are and have been doing what is necessary in the face of resource scarcity, to get as much science done as possible with the best quality you can manage with those resources.

But does it create the replication crisis? Yes. yes it does.

Scientists are humans, and humans are prone to certain modes of mental derailment. There is a very strong bias that the current system is functioning well, even when many outstanding measures indicate it is not. (this study from the summary, and numerous others, for example.)

Why is that, I wonder?

Why do you insist that nothing is wrong, or that dedicated replication teams are so unglamorous, as to be worthless to academia-- or, in your words, "The things you give undergrads" ? (as if it is work "beneath actual scientists" rather than a valuable and indispensable tool in that process)

More pointedly, you assert that things are fine as they are, since "We still catch fraud"-- even though the data suggests that fraud is INCREASING, and catching it is falling behind, which would indicate a failure in methodology...

In fact, recent studies have indicated that its becoming so common, that its become an actual industry, and increase at a rate that very clearly indicates that this is NOT being adequately controlled:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.science.org%2Fconten...

Yet you insist that the methodology is fine-- Why is that?

Again, I would conjecture, it is because there is a startling degree of disdain for "mere replication of findings", combined with an awards system that actively prices that work out of the process, with no system in place that *ADEQUATELY* polices the problem. ("Adequately", because this rate or error is increasing at this very alarming rate) This is abundantly clear from widespread findings in the academic field, like the study I just posted a story about-- its just one of many.

Impact scoring (including impact factor), is very clearly not a sufficient control for this process. If it was, this result would not be appearing.

The scientific process would suggest that this is an observation, and that the next step is formulation of a hypothesis for testing.

I have provided one for you, and it can be tested. Why has this kind of thing not been proposed and examined with the appropriate process?

I can appreciate that there are precious few resources to allocate, but this kind of thing can be tested in small scales for performance quality measures.

It's what's called for by the scientific process, so why has academia resisted it so much?

Or, does academia think its own policies are somehow above the very process they use to wrest truth from bias? (again, scientists *ARE* humans, and humans *DO HAVE BIASES.* Things like "Sunk Costs Fallacy" and pals, spring instantly to mind, given the battle to attain tenure and recognition in a field. "Appeal to authority" also comes to mind, with rhetoric about Impact Factor and Reputation Scoring, in clear contravention of very observable trends.)

Try to be more objective about the degree and severity of this problem, and the outstanding need your vocation has to maintain its rigor and value to mankind.

Especially in the face of a very well funded, concerted effort to undermine that work.

Impact score is literally the number of times a paper is cited by other papers.

Instead of pretending it's magic, instead realize what happens when studies are *not* replicated.

A single study is conducted, and because it is the seminal paper, it gets lots of citations in related works.

Assuming an academic forger is smart, and does not make outlandish claims that break ancillary studies, they can go undetected for decades.

Like the work behind the amyloid hypothesis.

The methodology currently employed grants awards to very skilled fraudsters, in increasing quantity and severity, as suggested by this study, and supported by the observable lack of replication being done.

The politcians I mention provide an insufficient financial resource to provide for the degree of replication needed, replication scientists dont get near the impact scores of seminal paper authors, and conversely, through the the process you laid out, dont get funding approved, leading to them getting even less funding, because you cant realistically do science on a 0$ budget to get the impact scores you need to be awarded that funding. You've created a singularity.

To have competative impact score ratios, there would need to be dedicated 'refutation firms', that predatorially kill published findings, and get citations for doing so. Those firms would need good premises and equipment equally on par with the vanguard, and in many disciplines, that's an equally costly outlay that may require a fed budgetary line item.

We dont have those, and we dont have those for reasons related to the insufficiency of impact score as a proxy for merit, combined with generally insufficient funding overall.

No. The *correct* way to fix this is to resolve the root cause:

How funding is awarded.

Currently, the paradigm is 'publish or perish', because science funding is only handed out to 'rockstars' by politicians who dont understand the fundamental value of boring replication work.

It is the toxic combination of 'I can only do work if I publish first and publish often!', and 'There is nobody checking my work anyway; nobody has the funding to do verification! that leads to this perverse outcome.

Further restriction to 'vip rockstars only!' Is a gross misunderstanding of the root problem, and would be heaping jetfuel on top of the dumpsterfire.

Turns out, you actually need non-rockstars--Lots of them.

And to have them, you have to fund them and their laboratories.

Oh, how awful! You cant have 'only cream'. /s

The sooner this is realized in policy, the better.

Nature *always* invents a better idiot.

No no no, see, these regulations are working exactly as intended.

Google/Alphabet is looking for ways to extract more and more "Value(tm)" for their shareholders, and since they have already plumbed the legal avenues for revenue generation, the only options left are grey, and outright illegal methods of generating it, as it concerns user privacy, and as it relates to monopolistic business practices.

The "Innovation!!" that this, and other large companies are screaming about, is the "NEW! and AMAZING, MONEY MAKING OPPORTUNITIES!" presented by Flagrantly violating consumer and market ethics, and they are OH, SO VERY UPSET by this.

The pointed response to this, is to ask google, bluntly, what exactly it has really brought in terms of USEFUL PRODUCT in the past decade, because search is DEMONSTRABLY inferior to what it was in the past (which is enshitification, not innovation), and Google Play services are just a walled garden pretending to be open by comparison with apple's white-plastic-dystopia.

The only thing it's really invested in, is in new and increasingly awful ways to fuck over users of their platform for profit. (The a-fore mentioned Grey and Illegal practices I mentioned)

EU regulation is doing EXACTLY what it is supposed to be doing, and Google needs to be FUCKING TOLD THIS, VERY VERY FUCKING PUBLICLY.

Sadly, our regulators here are so bought and paid for by these trolls, that such a missive will be a very long day coming, but hopefully EU stands firm in actually fucking protecting their citizenry, as opposed to the fucking gilded age horseshit we have over here in the states about these matters.

It gets a lot worse when you realize that state propaganda operations can greatly maximize on this.

You are quite correct that this is very old news (Cambridge Analytica was how many years ago now?) and that state propagandists have been using this for years now (I seem to recall the last TWO presidential elections being heavily influenced by a FUCKING RAFT of state misinformation campaigns by multiple foreign nations, and even some domestic thinktank operations).

I agree that the technology itself is not directly harmful. If it was kept inside word processors as advanced text prediction, or advanced grammar checking or something, it would be a fine, safe, and legitimate use of what it really is-- however, Money Talks, and if the empowered-and-unscrupulous demographic out there can further increase their grifting, *THEY FUCKING WILL*.

Sometimes it's important to understand and appreciate why we cannot have nice things.

Usually, those reasons revolve around the existence and activities of such people, and how cozy they are with government.

The baloney detection kit has never been more essential to install in children.

Unfortunately, this has been actively stymied by certain political groups (on both sides of the aisle, for different reasons), and almost nobody comes equipped with one, "Because its easier!"

Humanity is doomed.

It COULD (in theory, at least) get directly cabbaged up by something like ReactOS though.

MIT allows re-licensing under new terms (GPL Primacy), IIRC.

Whether or not ReactOS is .... Mature enough.... (giggle)... to accept the newly opened code as a viable POSIX subsystem provider is another matter entirely, however.

Still, Gift horses and mouths, and all that.

If you want a start-menu interface, though, you dont really want steamOS.

You want normal linux with LXDE, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, or KDE.

That, and Heroic Game Launcher, and Proton Tricks. (So you can set up D3DVK on the containers in question. Heroic does not use VKD3D by default, because it wants to be able to run on devices without vulkan. DXVK support is fail-safeable behind wineD3D modes, but D3DVK is not. The latter *ONLY* does DX12 libraries, but shares the same infra/backend as DXVK.)

DX12 only games work very well with VKD3D, and Vulkan.

Proton supports this out of the gate on SteamOS. DX12-only is a nothingburger, on hardware that has suitable vulkan drivers.

In a surprising number of cases, they work *Better* than native DX12 on the same hardware.

Unlike other game launchers/stores, Steam (even in handheld mode) is very easy-going on setting up and using alternatives.

See for instance, Heroic Game Launcher, which can very painlessly integrate games from Amazon, Epic, and GOG into a steamdeck's library.