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bildungon An Austrian communications professor who hunts plagiarists

> Pointing out the book was not such a big deal then is like pointing to a fake PhD thesis full of quotes,

I didn't do that, you mis-inferred that from my post.

Funnily enough this is exactly what happened with Baerbocks CV: She didn't "fake" anything there, she e.g. said she studied in Hamburg without saying that she obtained a degree there. And she stated that she was a member of some high profile organisations, which was technically true. In both cases she wasn't lying.

bildungon An Austrian communications professor who hunts plagiarists

Note this is about two distinct types of work: Guttenberg faked a dissertation to obtain an academic degree, Baerbock did so when publishing a pop culture book, essentially the offline equivalent of a medium/substack account.

Not a fan of plagiarism either way, but those two cases are hardly comparable. Both are copyright issues, but faking a dissertation adds fraud to the equation and disqualifies the person from future academic work.

bildungon Geizhals – Tech Product Price Comparison and Tracking

A really wonderful site, great filters, great price tracking. The only thing I'd wish for would be the ability to exclude all those amazon.com shops from the results (everyone from amazons marketplace seems to be listed as a distinct shop there).

bildungon Paid influencers must label some posts as ads, German court rules

Just compare German and US influencer spam to see that laws like this actually have an effect.

bildungon MDMA reopens child-like “critical periods” in the brain

> which is to say it hasn't been found to work in a natural setting

This says that the drug creates the ability to relearn something, but the learning process itself is of course mediated by the setting provided - learning is always about interaction with the environment. This has nothing to do with weasel words, it simply illustrates the mode of action.

bildungon MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

Retail electricity prices in France are €0,13/kWh, so not that cheap (€0,18/kWh pre pandemic).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/418087/electricity-price...

This doesn't matter, though, because France doesn't need many nukes anymore, therefore doesn't subsidizes new plants anymore. One new plant is built in France, and it already is hellishly expensive: "As of 2020 the project is more than five times over budget and years behind schedule. Various safety problems have been raised, including weakness in the steel used in the reactor." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamanville_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

bildungon MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

But how should that gain in energy output be possible without making the whole system huge, too? The heat generating part of a nuclear power station only makes up a small fraction, most of the material is for transforming the heat to electricity and to shield off radiation. If you want to process more heat, you need more infrastructure to do so.

bildungon Led by Tesla, EVs drive chip industry's shift beyond silicon

That's only because production has been moved to developing countries. Calculating consumption-based energy use (which includes energy "embodied" in things produced elsewhere, but consumed in the US), things look less great. See https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/ p. 21 (in the context of decoupling of material use and GDP growth)

bildungon People are realizing that degrowth is bad

> Growth doesn’t mean that we make materially more things, but that we make better things. Compared to a torch, a calculator, a phone, a GameBoy, etc… an iPhone requires far less raw materials. This can be applied to any industry, so exponential growth is indeed possible.

In the debate, this is called decoupling, meaning the decoupling of rising material and/or energy consumption with economic growth.

The problem is that absolute decoupling couldn't been shown anywhere, when looking at actual empirical data. This is a pretty exhaustive summary of current research about this: https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/

bildungon Supply Chain Shortages Continue Around the World. Get Used to It

Companies don't pay VAT, it is a consumer-only tax. In countries having VAT, companies always treat VAT as an item-in-transit in their books.

In your Apple example, the consumer pays the $1000 plus the 5% VAT to Apple, and Apple sends the 5% VAT to the IRS. If Apple bought components for that phone that included VAT, the supplier providing the components sends that VAT to the IRS, and Apple can claim that VAT from the IRS.

bildungon European Payments Initiative (EPI)

Can only speak for Germany, but those 3 are certainly huge. Probably 2/3 of all bank accounts in Germany.

bildungon California to open five natural gas plants to avoid blackouts

EVs are a tiny market in the US, smaller than e.g. the EV market in Germany (which has <20% of the US population) - I can't imagine this to be a big source of new grid load.

IMO a huge win-win situation would be enforcement of modern building techniques (proper insulation and/or thermal mass, double or triple glazed windows etc). That would enlarge qualitiy of living for the inhabitants, massively reduce energy consumption due to much less need for AC both in summer and winter. And buildings would probably last longer.

If enforced by law, this wouldn't even increase TCO of new buildings due to scale. That this isn't currently available in the US is essentially market failure: Small scale for modern construction means much higher prices than elsewhere, and better building quality currently is too esoteric to proportionally raise resale value.

bildungon The rich get richer and rates get lower

> We have an entity which literally fixes the interest rate through a variety of methods and yet we're talking about why rates are the way they are. Boggles the mind.

If you'd read just a tiny bit into macro economics (every intro textbook will work), it stops doing so.

bildungon High blood pressure cases double in 30 years

More like 5 million per year: https://oi-files-d8-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fs-pub...

bildungon Valneva and Pfizer announce Phase 2 study for Lyme disease vaccine candidate

I really looked into that quite deeply. Biontech got so much money for funding the trials that they apparently had too much and put it in reserve for 2022. The public invested billions into building production capacity.

I'd be glad to see what Pfizer actually invested that wasn't backed by prepurchases.

bildungon Rent control isn’t working in Sweden

> All of these places suffering from severe housing shortages have some government policy which can clearly be linked to it.

All these ill people have doctors around them, which also can clearly be linked. That in itself doesn't seem to be an argument.

(Note I'm not taking positions here, I don't know enough about the topic)

bildungon Show HN: Hippobase – easily self-host open source databases

"The SSPL is Not an Open Source License" https://opensource.org/node/1099

bildungon Valneva and Pfizer announce Phase 2 study for Lyme disease vaccine candidate

To my knowledge Pfizer didn't really invest anything, it was the German population who financed Biontech through funds paid with taxes: the lab infrastructure pre-covid (through funded cancer research), the vaccine trials, and mass production (both directly and through pre-purchases before the vaccine existed).

bildungon Welcoming our first riders in San Francisco

That's just devious marketing on Tesla's part. They can always excuse customer misunderstandings with the original meaning you explained, while normal people can be savely expected to interpret autopilot as full self driving (and I'd be surprised if they didn't have actually tested this with focus groups beforehand). So not really lying (great for the lawsuits), but constructing misunderstanding on purpose (great for the brand image).

bildungon Dorothy Butler Gilliam: ‘I am not a maid, I am a reporter’

No idea about the specific situation in the US, but in my experience these kinds of distortions are almost always because said public school can only get the 10M for sports facilities because there is a specific fund for exactly this but not general school funding. The school then applies for it anyway because that means they can divert 100k or some other paltry share of said funds to be used for general school equipment etc.

bildungon Rain at the Summit of Greenland

> the Mass loss was 3333 gigatons for that first decade (May 2002-Sep 2012).

You conveniently used a month with an unusually sharp drop as your end of decade, which make me think I'm feeding a troll, but nevertheless:

The correct decade is May 2002 to April or May 2012, which gives you 272 gigatons per year as the average. There is pretty obvious seasonality in the data, so you can't just jump between seasons.

You could also use September 2002 to September 2012, if you insist on including the outlier month, which would work out out to 309 gigatons/year.

bildungon ImageNet contains naturally occurring Apple NeuralHash collisions

Because people behind the keyboards make mistakes all the time. Just in the last month i experienced

* a call center agent at a haulage firm, instead of entering the delivery date we talked about on the phone, clicked for the delivery to be returned to the factory.

* Google automatically blocked an ad account from delivering ads because we allegedly profiteered from Covid (untrue of course, but we surly talked about the challenges caused by the pandemic somewhere on the site, so the "AI" apparently got triggered by some keywords), and humans repeatedly confirmed the AI decision.

* Facebook blocked an ad account that was unused in 2020, wanted ID, got the correct ID (identical name etc.), and the human denied confirmation.

Google and Facebook are of course known to be beyond kafkaesque, so this is no surprise. But imagine the costs the innocents pay once they accidently get entered into the FBI CP suspect database.

bildungon German parliament pens letter to Apple with concerns over CSAM detection system

It doesn't matter whether the feature is active right now - its presence means it is only a matter of time until agencies will want to have access.

bildungon Why Doesn't Software Show Up in Productivity?

To add an anecdote: No Code already was the hot new thing in the 90s when I studied CS. You could click together custom interfaces in Delphi and even do basic wiring with clicking alone, IIRC. Devs expected that laypeople click together the solution they want and developers do the remaining wiring. Yet no non-developer could actually use that thing. Nowadays I think the main hurdle is the transformation of a fluffy real world problem into something of an algorithm. Developers do this almost unconsciously, because they practice this all the time, and thus are usually not aware of it. Yet this process of quantification of the real world problem often is the actual problem, not writing it down as code.

bildungon Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

None of those countries you listed[1] is regarded as a industrialized/developed/first world country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial%20nation

[1] Except Israel, which essentially never differs from the US in UN voting behaviour.

bildungon Guantánamo survivor on the war on terror’s failure

> The concept of an international criminal court itself is an affront to national sovereignty, and isn’t very widely supported.

It is supported (i.e. signed and ratified) by all industrialized countries except the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States_parties_to_the_Rome_Sta...

bildungon Lenovo Selling Linux Laptops Directly in the US

Yes, the M1 is about 0-20% faster in single core benchmarks and slower in everything multi-core. https://www.notebookcheck.net/R7-5700U-vs-M1_12978_12937.247...

bildungon Metabolism peaks at age one and tanks after 60, study finds

Aren't lower testosterone levels a result of lack of exercise and thus weight gain, instead of the cause of weight gain?

bildungon Germany to Stop Free Covid-19 Tests in October

Oh I'm not against testing at all. I was just talking about why people used these these extra test centers in Germany: Because a negative test receipt was of equally weight as a prove of vaccination when participating in events etc. That will end, but that doesn't mean testing will stop. You can still go to a physician for PCR or do antigen tests.

bildungon Germany to Stop Free Covid-19 Tests in October

That's why the sentence had a second half: ", which is less common to begin with." That's the purpose of a vaccination.