GalenErso

Why? Why can't scientists from outside the US and Western Europe seek international co-authors, like everyone else?

> Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.

This works in tech but not necessarily in other white collar fields like finance. In finance, there is an unwritten rule that you are supposed to settle with a firm by ~30-35 and stay there for the rest of your career. Many firms don't hire laterally unless they have no other choice. Professionals like investment bankers and CFAs are recruited straight out of university and groomed to assume leadership positions in the long term.

What causes El Niño to happen every few years? What mechanism drives the phenomenon? I was thinking maybe sun spots, but sun spots have 11 year cycles on average, so I don't think it's the cause. Why doesn't El Niño happen every year, like hurricanes?

More expensive cars are better for the environment if people start driving less or stop driving. But it's worse for the environment if people hold on to older cars, because they are less fuel efficient than newer models and release more fine particles in the air.

Hair and eye color are simple epigenetical traits, and very easily measurable. As for size, I don't know if you've traveled to East Asia recently, but the young generations are just as tall as we Westerners. I follow a number of Asian bodybuilders and they aren't any smaller than your average white bodybuilder. The stereotype is likely the product of a historically poor nutrition, but that has changed, and Asians born in the last 30-40 years are proof.

Intelligence, on the other hand, is far more complex to define, measure and test than eye color or height.

Can't their success be more attributed to a culture that favors learning and education, as well as the relative financial prosperity of Ashkenazi Jews compared to other groups? That the children of successful artists, scientists, or financiers become successful artists, scientists and financiers themselves is least surprising.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come to mind.

I'll cut straight to the chase:

White people are _not_ more intelligent than black people. And it is both factually incorrect and racist to believe so.

- "I never said white people were mo--" Sure, but that is nevertheless the belief held by 99% of the people who think that some ethnicities are inherently more intelligent than others. It's a reasonable assumption that that is what you think.

> (UK) Internet traffic took a significant nosedive, dropping by as much as 18%. The Sunday trends didn't stop there. As night fell and Prince William took to the stage to deliver a speech during the Coronation Concert, there was a clear drop in Internet traffic.

Reposting a comment from Reddit[1]:

Microsoft has been bleeding talent for the last 5-6 years due to low compensation. It's why the SLT authorized a "correction" in pay last year that saw many people get a significant pay bump. Lots of new college hires have even stated that Microsoft's offer was the lowest offer they received. Levels.fyi tells basically the same story as well if you compare Microsoft to many other tech companies.

One thing to note is that the bonus and stock award budget have been reduced from last year where it was inflated. So, it's back to normal. What is frustrating is that it's also likely "back to normal" for the executives when it should be minimal to non-existent. The pessimist in me says that this is nothing more than juicing the quarterly stats so that Satya and his directs hit their targets for their "normal" bonuses.

Honestly, this is the closest I've seen the company to unionization and I'm willing to bet that efforts are going to start soon. Especially if the Q4/annual results exceed expectations.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13dveyv/microso...

> I'll give the country 10 years to implode

I'll take predictions that won't happen for 100, Alex.

Unfortunately for Taiwan, it doesn't have the ability to prevent the U.S. from destroying TSMC's factories with: long range cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, PGMs, or special forces. But that wouldn't be necessary to deny China TSMC.

> Last year we reported on TSMC Chairman Mark Liu, who told interviewers that, “Nobody can control TSMC by force.” He reasoned(opens in new tab) that, “If you take a military force or invasion, you will render TSMC factories inoperable.” But, explosives wouldn’t be needed, according to Liu, as TSMC's fine-tuned operations would simply crumble as its real-time connections with the outside world evaporated. However, we should remember that China’s motives should not be measured against business rationality. Instead, its policies may be colored by a leader seeking glory, destiny, a legacy, and so on.

Doesn't Adobe want people to become familiar with their tools, regardless of legality, so they continue to use them later in the workplace?

I didn't get my first real phone until after high school, while everyone else had one.

I graduated salutatorian. I was able to focus on my homework after school for hours without distractions. I had a computer at home, but it was pretty crappy.

Continents can rise and fall without changes in the quantity of liquid water on the surface. One must also consider the fact that the world was much warmer then, so things like Greenland, the Antarctic ice sheet, and glaciers did not exist. If all the ice covering Antarctica , Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world of today were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The answer to your question is that a portion of this water turned into ice. Ice that is now turning back to liquid form thanks to climate change. Another factor is that water is also slowly disappearing into the Earth's crust. When the Russians dug 12 kilometers into the crust, they discovered that rocks at that depth were saturated with water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole?useski...

- Confusing naming conventions. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. Compare to Sony's Playstations 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Names matter enormously. There's a reason why FAANG and FAANG-tier tech firms all have very simple names. While that may be far from the only reason why these companies are so successful, it matters more than one thinks.

- Lack of AAA exclusives. Halo is the main one, but Sony has God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, all the Spider Men, The Last of Us, Gran Turismo, and others.

- Price. The PS4 was cheaper than the Xbox One by $100, and this mattered to parents who could afford to gift their children a $400-$500 console, but not a $1,500+ gaming PC. This matters less in the North American market, where people have more disposable income, but East Asian and European markets are safely in Sony's pocket.

- Controllers? There is a meme that Xbox controllers are designed for large, "American" hands. Regardless of the truth, memes and perceptions shape decisions.

- Sony has the Japanese market locked up. Xbox is the dominant console in the US, but its dominance is weak: 53.3% vs. 46.65% for the Playstation.[1] Which begs the question: why hasn't Microsoft crushed the competition in its prime domestic market, but Sony crushed theirs in Japan?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1044948/market-share-of-...

The fact that the minimum wage has remained unchanged for so long has an interesting economic consequence: it has effectively abolished the concept of a minimum wage. Nordic countries like Germany don't have a minimum wage. Rather, labor unions negotiate pay rates for various industries, and businesses are free to set their own rates. Left-wing people in the US think that abolishing the minimum wage would be a disaster, as businesses would be free to pay their workers peanuts. But this is not what's actually happening in other industrialized countries without a mandated minimum wage. Sure, a business could offer $4/hour, but because it would not be a liveable wage, no one would take those jobs, even people who are desperate. Likewise, $7.25/hour, the mandated minimum wage in the US, is now so low compared to the cost of living that no business is paying that anymore, even the penny-pinching ones. So the labor market situation in the US at the moment resembles more that of Nordic European countries.

It may be that the lack of a minimum wage in a situation of labor scarcity empowers workers. When there is a mandated minimum wage, a business can pay that, because it's an easy decision. But when there is no minimum wage, businesses have to work harder to determine an appropriate pay level. They have to conduct market research, hire consultants, study their competitors, and make a decision.

Apple could just squash the unhappy shareholders with its private army. Kill two birds with one stone. My plan is foolproof.

Fear will keep the shareholders in line.

Apple's quarterly revenue is higher than Russia's annual defense expenditure. Let that sink in.

Now imagine if Apple wanted to use 1/3 of its net income to create a private military at the edge of technology.

Until you forget the combination.

So, should we expect the AI equivalent of Hiroshima in a couple months? An awe inspiring demonstration of raw power to silence any detractors? What would that look like?

That person will naturally impose himself or herself through the strength of their achievements and sheer willpower in such a way that there will be not a shred of doubt in the mind of the public that this individual is worthy of deference and reverence.

No one decided Einstein was the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Einstein did his thing and let the results speak for themselves.

There are countless programmers, from self taught amateurs to professional SWEs, white hats, grey hats and black hats, who would immediately jump at the opportunity to create stronger VPNs, mirror sites, Tor nodes, and other tools to allow the public to bypass these restrictions. Trying to control the Internet in America is a losing proposition, for better or worse.

I can think of a few situations where taking the life of another human being would be justified, as a last resort.

But it won't work. The administration won't trade spending cuts for a clean hike. It's like a hostage taker whose demands aren't met. You're left with two options: surrender, or shoot the hostage. Neither gets you what you want, but one is more reasonable than the other.

> Disregarding the Court is a constitutional crisis.

Then a constitutional crisis there shall be. Words don't scare me. If a "constitutional crisis" means the government _doesn't_ default on its debt and some politicians and pundits cry foul, and nothing else changes under the heavens, then let's have a "constitutional crisis".

> On the other hand, we have the President unilaterally overruling the Congress and the Court. One is a check. The other a coup.

Congress can impeach and convict if it's such a big deal. Until they do...

> There is no explicit power for the executive to ignore the judicial.

But there is: it's called the Constitution. Not any particular clause or article, but the whole document. The executive is allowed to check the judicial if the judicial ignores the Constitution. How else is the executive supposed to check the judicial?

> It would be a VERY BAD precedent to do that again.

It would be a bad precedent, but it would be an even worse precedent for the Supreme Court to force the government to default on its debt. The least bad of the two evils would be for the government to continue paying its debt by waving the debt ceiling away.

Sure, and what if the court said the First Amendment of the Constitution was unconstitutional? The courts can interpret the Constitution. They cannot disregard it wholesale. The power of the judicial branch is not absolute. It can be checked by the other two: the legislative branch and the executive branch. And one way for the executive branch to check the judicial branch is to disregard judicial rulings that are blatantly unconstitutional, just like the judicial branch regularly invalidates entire laws and government programs. This is not a dictatorship or a coup. It's just the balance of power. The courts check the executive. The executive checks the courts. Of course, there's a fine line between disregarding a ruling that would cause the US to default, and disregarding a ruling that would, say, invalidate a conservative or liberal policy bill. But if the courts stop playing nice with the executive, the executive should stop playing nice with the judicial, as much as necessary.

"I have directed the Treasury Department to continue honoring our financial commitments to bondholders. My administration will ignore any rulings, by any court, or judge, that would seek to impair all or part of this order, as such rulings would be unconstitutional. I will not allow legal technicalities or political games to threaten the full faith and credit of the United States of America. It it so decided."

I would say these words.

It's unlikely the House will pass a clean debt ceiling hike. The GOP has not budged since the beginning of the new Congress. The MAGA caucus is determined to extract spending cuts at any costs. The way I see it, one of three things will happen:

1) The executive branch will invoke Section 4 of the 14th Amendment[1] and direct, by Executive Order, the Treasury Department to continue paying interest to bondholders, effectively abolishing the debt ceiling with the stroke of a pen, and without Congress' approval. This is my preferred option. There already exists a strong legal argument that the existence of the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. This maneuver would allow the White House and Congress to fight the issue in the courts without defaulting. The administration could also mint the oft-discussed trillion dollar coin, or a couple of them, if that loophole still exists.

2) A few sane House Republicans will cross party lines and vote for a clean debt ceiling hike with the Democrats. The Speaker would not be able to prevent it, and what happens to Kevin McCarthy doesn't matter here. Democrats can introduce a bill and force a floor vote without the Speaker's approval (?) Someone correct me on this.

3) Default. Either the US government stops paying bondholders, or the Fed buys bonds in default (this is called a technical default), or the Treasury keeps paying interest but slashes spending in other areas, like Medicare, to pay for it. However, there are serious doubts as to whether this "debt prioritization" maneuver would be legal and/or constitutional.

Or the administration could cave and give the Republicans what they want, but I don't see that happening, because it would greatly harm Biden's reelection chances and hand a huge political victory to the GOP.

[1] The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.

They do, but these maps are either incomplete, or they don't always follow them.

The Los Angeles-class nuclear submarine USS San Francisco (SSN-711) nearly sank on January 8, 2005, when it hit an uncharted undersea mountain about 364 nautical miles (675 km) southeast of Guam while operating at flank (maximum) speed at a depth of 525 feet (160 m). [1]

The Seawolf-class nuclear powered fast attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN-22) suffered damage on October 2, 2021, after it collided with an undersea mountain while maneuvering in the South China Sea. [2]

And the Swiftsure-class nuclear powered fast attack submarine HMS Superb (S109) had to be decommissioned ahead of schedule due to the damage it suffered during a collision with an underwater pinnacle in the Red Sea, 80 miles (130 km) south of the Suez Canal. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_San_Francisco_(SSN-711)?us...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Connecticut_(SSN-22)?usesk...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Superb_(S109)?useskin=vect...