I'm a research engineer in the nominal prime of my career with all kinds of impressive-looking letters after my name. I, too, am a firm believer in systematic, hard-nosed, and uncompromising interrogation of Nature.

I mention this because I would prefer not to be misconstrued as yet another loudmouth in the peanut gallery when I say that the scientific enterprise, both the public-facing and the inward-facing parts, are a badly broken remnant of a once-great human endeavor. And political extremists of both colors (one in capital-S science and one outside it) bear a large portion of the responsibility. But since we all know which stripe of extremist actually influences the direction of science, I assign it a larger fraction of the blame than I do to the inhabitants of the peanut gallery.

Started reading a copy of Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World that my uncle gave me a while back.

First chapter calls out thalidomide as a nucleation site for public mistrust of the scientific enterprise (book was written in 1995 back when memories of it were fresher).

Sagan distinctly falls onto the "science cheerleader" camp in today's culture wars, but it's telling that even the patron saint of capital-S Skepticism opens his final book with an exhortation to humility among scientists and presumably also the science cheerleaders.

That lack of humility has been, and very much still is, a nucleation site for skepticism of science and the scientific enterprise. Perhaps one could argue (as the smug intellectual class of today often does) that the skeptics don't need any excuses so it's not worth walking on tiptoes to avoid giving them ammunition.

But that argument is born of hubris, insularity, and a misreading of the human condition. Science that is conspicuously scrupulous about things like refraining from making wild claims about things like ScienceJesus healing the sick and regrowing limbs with a touch and technobable is going to maintain and retain more trust than a scientific enterprise that walks, acts, and quacks like just another priesthood.

;;

By analogy, I'm closer than ever to being a billionaire astronaut olympic sprinter.

They voted for AI and automation to wipe out office work?

No. You couldn't and he didn't.

What went down was:

A few days after the crash, he pointed out that you could hear the RAT just before the crash blossoms.

That's legacy Fox, with the Marvel label slapped on. The original Deadpool would never have gotten made inside of Disney proper.

From the article:

"U.S. public companies have cut their white-collar workforces by 3.5% over the past three years"

I'm sorry, who was President during that time?

These are permanent structural changes, a long time in coming. Predicted by many and blown off by many more.

The problem with a "knowledge economy" is that automation can basically take over 95 percent of it. You need a balance of services and manufacturing and agriculture, and the first world knowledge economies have been outsourcing the later two to cheaper third world countries and teaching their youth that getting their hands dirty is beneath them. Anytime someone brings up plumbing or welding or some construction work, there's a group here that always responds with "Back-breaking! No! Undignified!".

Fine. So starve then. You're not getting your UBI or a lifetime welfare state. So I suggest you learn a skill that can't be replaced with a glorified Google script, or hope your parents have saved enough money to support you on their couch while you protest the indignities of spreading drywall or operating a backhoe.

Let's take the other counterfactual by consulting present reality. Let's say Mosadegh got into power and cozied up to the Soviets in the 50s. Okay cool. What would it have looked like if Iran were aligned against the West and with the Russians? Well...that's the facts on the ground now and it doesn't seem to be working out for them given that their leadership is being bombed out of existence and the Russians can't do anything for them.

Well if the beatings don't do the job...

y'all get together in a big room at the same time.

Why here's an inviting one in pristine condition...

Shut up, Ryan.

Just about any newspaper or news network site now is either paywalled, or a defacto browser hijacker that floods you with pop-ups, videos, and subscription requests as soon as you enter.

Then it doesn't matter if there's a glaring bug or missing features because the glaring bug can be avoided by handshake agreement and the missing features simply don't exist in your little social bubble of geeks.

I've written and worked on several large (100kloc+) pieces of software like that over the past 20 years or so.

And then a commercial package comes along that costs something north of $50k/seat but actually fixes all those bugs and handles the corner cases y'all were too lazy to implement.

But of course it doesn't do what it does in your self-evidently correct way so there'sa ton of glue code you need to write...and it's expensive...and who knows if their guys *really* understand the domain-specific subtleties the way our guys do...and you've already got your workflow down so...why acknowledge it exists at all?