397 karma · joined December 5, 2017
To get there, we would need to assume that the Supreme Court, including only 3 Trump-appointed Justices, is both unwaveringly partisan and unwaveringly supportive of dictatorship.
During the Presidency, impeachment and judicial review are the important checks. During the transition of power, state-controlled (as in, not federally controlled) elections and Congressional certification are the important checks.
While many people are disappointed with Congress' hesitation to impeach, impeachment as an institutional protection still works as a protection against blatant disregard of the law. Congress faces the threat of re-election practically constantly, and obvious disregard of the law without impeachment is not in Congress' best interest.
Judicial review is clearly working. I don't need to recap the large number of cases that have be brought against the Trump administration this term. The administration is abiding by stays/injunctions, and the Courts are issuing opinions independently. The Supreme Court, even Trump-appointed Justices, has ruled against Trump before and will likely do it again.
State-level control of Presidential elections and Congressional accountability to the public during certification protect against the spectre of a third Trump term or end of democracy. This scenario is extremely unpopular even among Trump supporters and would be a disaster for those in Congress.
The recent Supreme Court opinion about Presidential immunity in his official capacity explicitly defers and leaves to the lower Courts to determine the precise limits of that official capacity. It is beyond belief that the entire judicial branch would collectively enable dictatorship "bEcAuSe iMmUnItY".
The EO is going out of its way to broadcast that its purpose is to establish a unitary policy position of the executive branch that stems from the President, rather than having "independent" agencies providing contrary position from within "in their official capacity" "as the position of the United States." The logical leap from there to "the President's (unrestricted) opinion is the law (without reference to Congress or the Courts)" is vast.
The EO does not bear on the balance of powers between branches of government, but on the ability for the executive branch to function as a single entity within that balance, rather than a multiplicity of quasi-"independent" agencies.
The disincentives that have always prevented the executive from blatantly violating the law are still in force and unchanged. They have been functional through 250 years of Presidents testing the limits of their authority.
> Geopolitics aside, I think everyone is kind of aware that gambling is a vice, and like it or not, this could just be the beginning of our society beginning to scrutinize these platforms.
Not really. TikTok isn't a gambling app.
> this innovation could fundamentally reshape fertilizer manufacturing by providing a more sustainable, cost-effective alternative to centralized production
The high energy cost of Haber-Bosch, plus the additional cost of transportation from manufacturer to farmer could potentially be eliminated by distributed, passive fertilizer generators scattered around in the fields.
I'm no expert, but assuming sufficient local production, low concentration could potentially be overcome by continuous fertilization with irrigation throughout the growing season.
Let's find out. Some quick fiddling with a molarity calculator and an almanac:
-- 100 uM ammonia -> 1.7 mg / L ammonia
-- 82% nitrogen -> 1.4 mg / L nitrogen
-- My lawn needs around 1 lb / 1000 sq ft, or around 5 g / m2
-- So my lawn needs about 3500 L / m2 of fertilized irrigation total for the season
-- Ballpark farming irrigation is around 0.2 inches per day, or around 5L/m2
I would need to water my lawn about 700 days in the year, or more realistically up my irrigation rate by about a factor of 4, AND source all of the water from the fertilizer box.
I'm a little skeptical that I can allocate space for enough production and still have a lawn left to fertilize. The tech probably isn't ready for the big time on an industrial farm yet, but for research demo, this seems like a promising direction! Much more than concentrating it for fuel.
This is an interesting perspective that I disagree with. You seem to be saying that a general misunderstanding or misapplication of a good idea degrades the idea to a point that "destroys" it.
On the contrary, I believe there is experience to be gained in practice: either the initial idea wasn't good after all, in which case we're destroying an illusion; or the poor examples serve to refine the idea by clarifying some ambiguity that, interpreted wrongly, leads to failure.
Perhaps your argument is that many people may become familiar with the bad implementations and the idea's popularity will decline, depressing demand for refined implementations. This is likely true, but reflects the tragedy of the anticommons, not a degradation in the idea itself.
> “Physicists are much less concerned than mathematicians about rigorous proofs,” says Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the Collège de France and a Fields Medal winner. Sometimes, he says, that “allows physicists to explore mathematical terrain more quickly than mathematicians.”
GP is right that the currently observed physical laws go far beyond our ability to observe them in reality because of the cost of observations. International effort over decades is required to create facilities capable of making helpful new observations: think of LHC, LIGO, James Webb, etc.
On the other hand, once the facilities are built and ground-breaking observations appear, we suddenly have a debt of theoretical and simulated exploration to understand all their implications. The low cost of computation greatly extends the value we can take from every truly new observation of reality.
In order to observe something new, we must be able differentiate it from something already understood. It seems like the physics and math communities are currently in a season of increasing our understanding of the existing models well enough to motivate trying to break them.
I did my undergrad at a state school with a middling engineering program, where I had ample free time to explore topics in depth, pursue extracurriculars that taught me far more than my classes, and have a thriving social life.
Contrast that experience to what I saw as a teaching assistant at Georgia Tech: undergrads who are so full of classwork that they're punting on the least-valuable graded assignments, never mind extracurriculars. The level of rigor in courses is much higher, but it presses out freedom to explore independently.
Another datapoint: I competed against GT extracurricular teams during my undergrad years, and we beat them handily almost every time because their students couldn't justify high effort for work that wasn't graded. I once saw a GT team arrive a day late to a competition, work on a robot for three hours at the adjacent table, realize their robot did not work, and drive home without competing.
What do you think are the reasons most education efforts are spent on children? It seems to mirror the fact that children spend a significant part of their time on education, while adult education is ad-hoc and self-directed. Are there other factors that you can see from inside the field?
Who is “we” in this comment? Christianity and Islam emphasize consciousness and the uniqueness of human experience, and their adherents still account more than 50% of the population.
As much popularity as the many worlds theory is gaining, the generic “we” almost certainly still doesn’t believe it, and many (most?) probably don’t even know about it.
That there could and should be some more sophisticated, objective definition of a recession than “two years of GDP decline” isn’t in question. But, at least according to your own source, NBER fails to provide that definition and is commonly criticized for is subjectivity during political years.
Maybe Bluetooth low energy could fit in that power envelope too?
Am I going mad? Is the surveillance state so deep in my subconscious that I fail to notice it’s observations? This article isn’t even tech related, why is it here?
I don’t agree. People generally don’t steal, but if they have no food, they will resort to theft to survive. Competition can prevent some ill effects of monopolistic tyranny, which I think is what you’re getting at here, but it breeds other evils.
I too have seen this phenomenon, and I think it’s pretty common recently because the used car market is really out of whack. In my case, last year I bought a lightly used Sonata for about $30k with 12k miles, and today I could still trade it for about the same price with 31k miles on it.
Where you’re wrong is that this phenomenon doesn’t apply in general to the used car market but only in the last few years because of the chip shortage shrinking the supply of new cars. Short supply in turn increased demand for used cars, raising the prices.
Visa states openly that they weren’t aware of the situation at issue, don’t support child pornography, and have taken steps to avoid supporting it. This isn’t a case of cutting off some “industry”; child pornography is already widely and rightly maligned.
My wife and friends know not to look through the journal without my permission, and I trust them. If I didn't trust them, I would find different friends.
At first, I bought the notebook to catalogue a trip to Europe. The first pages contain detailed daily logs of about 2 months of my life while I was there. At the time, I recall feeling like I was wasting valuable time that I could spend having more experiences, and there are many missing days as a result. But now 10 years later those pages contain stories I have failed to retain in my memory, and help me to reconstruct the days I didn't record. People and interactions I would have forgotten, short-lived but vivid crushes, a tomato sauce recipe transcribed poorly via a picture dictionary from a retired Italian grandmother at a hostel in Lourdes.
Other times, I've used the journal to clear my head during times of turmoil. Weak and unfinished thoughts on difficult circumstances, poetic images of my emotions, scribbled bullet lists of what happened and in what order as I tried to piece things together.
For a spell, the same journal was where I kept daily todo lists. Today, I'm using it as an outlet for my personal thoughts and goals, to keep them distinct from research notes and work notes. I find that writing them down helps me to clarify what I want and to move in a consistent direction over longer periods than focus and determination alone would allow.
The only consistent format for my journal is putting a date at the top of each entry and writing in pen so I can't erase it.
Every time I look back over what I've written, I take something different away; Rarely do I read what's there and count the act of writing it as a waste of time. It's a window into the past.